He ran across the road.  It would be better among the people.  It was not so bad if you did not watch them and see how happy they were.  Everybody in the world was happy except him.  No doubt Ellen and her Yaverland were just bursting with merriment in that cab.  Would they be at home yet?  She would be telling him all the office jokes.  Well, she might, for all he cared.  He knew fine that young Innes called him Mr. Philip Hop-o’-my-Thumb behind his back, and he didn’t give a straw for it.  He stopped in front of a picture-postcard shop that was hung from top to bottom of its window with strings of actresses’ photographs, and stood there with a jaunty rising and falling of the heels, bestowing an exaggerated attention on the glossy black and white patterns that indicated the glittering facades of these charmers’ smiles, the milky smoothness of their bean-fed femininity.  Ah, these were the really fine women that it was worth troubling your head about, from whose satin slippers, it was well known, dukes and the like drank champagne.  Who would bother about a wee typist when there were women like these in the world?

But as he looked at them he perceived that there was not one so beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her.  A woman who had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him.  She was taller than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear.  He hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and began to swear at her.  But before he could get the words out of his mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and what had happened.  That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still until one had finished swearing at her.

But all these women were vile.  There was no measure to the vileness that Ellen had brought on him.  For it was all her fault, since he never would have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she had carried on the evening before.  At the thought of that night in Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly.  It had all been so ugly, and it was a fraud too.  It had been his belief that the advantage of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly