“Something has happened,” said Jay to Chloris, as they went in.  “I feel as if I had no friends to-night.  Not even a Secret Friend.”

Chloris lay on her lap in her usual attitude, bent into a circle like a tinned tongue.  Chloris knew it was no use worrying about these things.

“Funny,” thought Jay.  “King David was a healthy man of ruddy countenance, and presumably he never lived in the Brown Borough, yet he knew very well what it feels like to have a temperature, and a sore heart, and to be alone in lodgings.  Whenever I am very tired, it is funny how my heart quotes those tired Psalms of his, without my brain remembering the words.  I wonder how David knew.”

The little house was empty but for her.  I ought perhaps to have told you before that Nana had been taken ill a month or so ago, and had gone away at Jay’s expense to a South Coast Home.

“I’ll go round and see Mrs.  ’Ero Edwards,” said Jay, when she had changed into mufti.  “Neither Chloris nor David is adequate to the moment.”

The ground-floor back room of Mrs.  ’Ero Edwards was crowded.  The Chap from the Top Floor was there, and Mrs. Dusty Morgan, and little Mrs. Love from Tann Street, and Mrs.  ’Ero Edwards’s daughter, Queenie, and several people’s children.  Conversation never wavered as Jay knocked and came in.  When you find that your entrance no longer fills a Brown Borough room with sudden silence, you may be glad and know that you have ceased to be a lidy or a toff.

The Chap from the Top Floor was talking, and everybody else was there to hear him do it, except Mrs.  ’Ero Edwards who could hardly bear it, because she only liked listening to herself.  Jay sat modestly in a corner and listened, like the other representatives of her generation.

The Chap from the Top Floor was an Older and Wiser Man.  His wife could not live with him, but he was very kind and fatherly to every one else, and Jay was rather fond of him.  He was about fifty, and anything but beautiful.  Also the C.O.S. would not have admired him.  But I believe he did a good deal of thinking inside that bristly head of his.

“Ow my dear,” said Mrs.  ’Ero Edwards, laying a fat hand on Jay’s knee.  “We’re all so ’appy.  Dusty’s wrote to siy ’e’s got the sack from the Army becos of ’is rheumatics.  We’re ‘avin’ a bit of a beano becos of it.”

Everybody smiled at Jay, and her heart grew warmer.  Some one handed her a cup of tea sweetened with half an inch of sugar at the bottom of the cup.  The spoon had been plunged to its hilt in condensed milk.  What vulgar tastes she had!

“You can never mike a pal of a woman,” said the Chap from the Top Floor, continuing an argument for the benefit of an audience of women.  “One feller an’ another—­well—­a pal’s a pal.  But women are all either wives or—­, there ain’t no manner of palliness in them.”

“’Tain’t gentlemanly to talk so, Elbert,” said Mrs.  ’Ero Edwards.  “Yore mother was a woman, an’ from ‘er comes all you know, I’m thinkin’, an’ all you are.  Women is pals with women, an’ men is pals with men.  It’s only when men an’ women gets assorted-like that palliness drops out.”