She is, even now, flagrantly illegal.  She might be given in charge for hitting people at any time, and be warned, or fined, or given a week.  But somehow it is only when she is overpast and I am recovering my wits that I recollect that she might be dealt with in this way.  She is the chartered libertine of British matrons, and assaulteth where she listeth.  The blows I have endured from her?  She fights people who are getting into ’buses.  It is no mere accidental jostling, but a deliberate shouldering, poking with umbrellas, and clawing.  It is her delight to go to the Regent Circus corner of Piccadilly, about half-past seven in the evening, accompanied by a genteel rout of daughters, and fill up whole omnibuses with them.  At that hour there are work-girls and tired clerks, and the like worn-out anaemic humanity trying to get home for an hour or so of rest before bed, and they crowd round the ’buses very eagerly.  They are little able to cope with her exuberant vitality, being ill-nourished and tired from the day’s work, and she simply mows through them and fills up every vacant place they covet before their eyes.  Then, I can never count change even when my mind is tranquil, and she knows that, and swoops threateningly upon me in booking offices and stationers’ shops.  When I am dodging cabs at crossings she will appear from behind an omnibus or carriage and butt into me furiously.  She holds her umbrella in her folded arms just as the Punch puppet does his staff, and with as deadly effect.  Sometimes she discards her customary navy blue and puts on a glittering bonnet with bead trimmings, and goes and hurts people who are waiting to enter the pit at theatres, and especially to hurt me.  She is fond of public shows, because they afford such possibilities of hurting me.  Once I saw her standing partly on a seat and partly on another lady in the church of St. George’s, Hanover Square, partly, indeed, watching a bride cry, but chiefly, I expect, scheming how she could get round to me and hurt me.  Then there was an occasion at the Academy when she was peculiarly aggressive.  I was sitting next my lame friend when she marked me.  Of course she came at once and sat right upon us.  “Come along, Jane,” I heard her say, as I struggled to draw my flattened remains from under her; “this gentleman will make room.”

My friend was not so entangled and had escaped on the other side.  She noticed his walk.  “Oh, don’t you get up,” she said. “This gentleman,” she indicated my convulsive struggles to free myself, “will do that. I did not see that you were a cripple.”

It may be some of my readers will recognise the lady now.  It can be—­for the honour of womankind—­only one woman.  She is an atavism, a survival of the age of violence, a Palaeolithic squaw in petticoats.  I do not know her name and address or I would publish it.  I do not care if she kills me the next time she meets me, for the limits of endurance have been passed.  If she kills me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen’s peace.  And if it is only one woman, then it was the same lady, more than half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel Road cruelly ill-treating a little costermonger.  If it was not she it was certainly her sister, and I do not care who knows it.