since she turned out to be an agreeable chatterbox with an amusing tongue.  She asked Philip to go and see her; she had rooms in Vincent Square, and was always in to tea at five o’clock; he went, was delighted with his welcome, and went again.  Mrs. Nesbit was not more than twenty-five, very small, with a pleasant, ugly face; she had very bright eyes, high cheekbones, and a large mouth:  the excessive contrasts of her colouring reminded one of a portrait by one of the modern French painters; her skin was very white, her cheeks were very red, her thick eyebrows, her hair, were very black.  The effect was odd, a little unnatural, but far from unpleasing.  She was separated from her husband and earned her living and her child’s by writing penny novelettes.  There were one or two publishers who made a specialty of that sort of thing, and she had as much work as she could do.  It was ill-paid, she received fifteen pounds for a story of thirty thousand words; but she was satisfied.

“After all, it only costs the reader twopence,” she said, “and they like the same thing over and over again.  I just change the names and that’s all.  When I’m bored I think of the washing and the rent and clothes for baby, and I go on again.”

Besides, she walked on at various theatres where they wanted supers and earned by this when in work from sixteen shillings to a guinea a week.  At the end of her day she was so tired that she slept like a top.  She made the best of her difficult lot.  Her keen sense of humour enabled her to get amusement out of every vexatious circumstance.  Sometimes things went wrong, and she found herself with no money at all; then her trifling possessions found their way to a pawnshop in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and she ate bread and butter till things grew brighter.  She never lost her cheerfulness.

Philip was interested in her shiftless life, and she made him laugh with the fantastic narration of her struggles.  He asked her why she did not try her hand at literary work of a better sort, but she knew that she had no talent, and the abominable stuff she turned out by the thousand words was not only tolerably paid, but was the best she could do.  She had nothing to look forward to but a continuation of the life she led.  She seemed to have no relations, and her friends were as poor as herself.

“I don’t think of the future,” she said.  “As long as I have enough money for three weeks’ rent and a pound or two over for food I never bother.  Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.  When things are at their worst I find something always happens.”