There was Jim too, a precise top-hatted city clerk who had forced himself on her one Saturday afternoon as she crossed Piccadilly Circus. He seemed such a pattern of rectitude, was so perfectly trim and brushed that she allowed herself to be inveigled into a cab and driven to a small flat in Bayswater. He was too prudent to visit anybody else's rooms, he said; he had his flat on a weekly tenancy. Jim kept rather a hold on her. He was neither rich nor generous; in fact Victoria's social sense often stabbed her for what she considered undercutting, but Jim used to hover about the Vesuvius five minutes before closing time, and once or twice when Victoria had had no luck he succeeded like the vulture on the stricken field. Most of the others were dream figures; she lost count of them. After a month she could not remember a face. She even forgot a big fellow whom she had called Black Beauty, who came down from somewhere in Devonshire for a monthly bust; he was so much offended that she had the mortification of seeing him captured by one of the outer circle who sit beyond the lights. In the middle of August the streets she called London were deserted. Steamy air, dust laden, floated over the pavements. The Vesuvius was half empty, and she had to cut down her standards. Just as she was contemplating moving to Folkestone for a month, however, she received a letter from solicitors in the Strand, Bastable, Bastable & Sons, informing her that 're Major Cairns deceased,' they were realising the estate on behalf of the administrators, and that they would be obliged if she would say when it would be convenient for her to convey the furniture of Elm Tree Place into their hands. This perturbed Victoria seriously. The furniture had a value, and besides it was the plant of a flourishing business. 'Pity he died suddenly,' she thought, 'he'd have done something for me. He was a good sort, poor old Tom.' She dressed herself as becomingly and quietly as she could, and, after looking up the law of intestacy in Whitaker, concluded that Marmaduke Cairns's old sisters must be the heirs. Then she sallied forth to beard the solicitor in his den. The den was a magnificent suite of offices just off the Strand. She was ushered into a waiting-room partitioned off from the general office by glass. It was all very frowsy and hot. There was nothing to read except the _Times_ and she was uncomfortably conscious of three clerks and an office boy who frequently turned round and looked through the partition. At last she was ushered in. The solicitor was a dry-looking man of forty or so; his parchment face, deeply wrinkled right and left, his keen blue eyes and high forehead impressed her as dangerous. He motioned her to an armchair on the other side of his desk.