Buckland Street was never empty, but she learned to pick her time for going in and out when the neighbours were at their meals or asleep.
She attended a church at an incredible distance from Waterloo, for fear people should learn her unfashionable address.

Her few friends lived in other suburbs whose streets she knew by heart, so that they took her for a neighbour.
When she was twenty-two she had become engaged to a clerk in a Government office, who sang in the same choir.

A year passed, and the match was suddenly broken off.

This was her only serious love-affair, for, though she was handsome in a singular way, her flirtations never came to anything.

She belonged to the type of woman who can take her pick of the men, and remains unmarried while her plainer friends are rearing families.
The natural destiny of the Waterloo girls was the factory, or the workshops of anaemic dressmakers, stitching slops at racing speed for the warehouses.