She tore herself away from her self-worship and quickly began to dress. She put on a light skirt in serge, striped black and white, threading her head through it with great care for fear she should damage her fringe net. She drew on a white blouse, simple enough though cheap. As it fastened along the side she did not have to call in Miss Briggs; which was fortunate, as this was the time when Miss Briggs carried coals. Victoria wriggled for a moment to settle the uncomfortable boning of the neck and, having buckled and belted the skirt over the blouse, completed her toilet with her little black and white jacket to match the skirt. A tiny black silk cravat from her neck was discarded, as she found that the fashionable ruffle, emerging from the closed coat, produced an _effet mousquetaire_. Lastly she put on her hat; a lapse from the fashions perhaps, but a lovable, flat, almost crownless, dead black, save a vertical group of feathers. Victoria drew her veil down, regretting the thickness of the spots, pushed it up to repair with a dab of powder the ravage of a pod on the tip of her nose. She took up her parasol and white gloves, a glow of excitement already creeping over her as she realised how cleverly she must have caught the spirit of the profession to look the actress to the life and yet remain in the note of the demure widow. Soho Place is neither one of the 'good' streets nor one of the 'bad.' The police do not pace it in twos and threes in broad daylight, yet they hardly like to venture into it singly by night. On one side it ends in a square; on the other it turns off into an unobtrusive side street, the reputation of which varies yard by yard according to the distance from the main roads. It is dirty, dingy; yet not without dignity, for its good Georgian and Victorian houses preserve some solidity and are not yet of the tenement class. They are still in the grade of office and shop which is immediately below their one-time status of dwellings for well-to-do merchants. Victoria entered Soho Place from the square, so that she was not too ill impressed. She walked in the middle of the pavement, unconsciously influenced the foreign flavour of Soho. There men and women stand all day in the street, talking, bargaining, quarrelling and making love; when a cab rattles by they move aside lazily, as a Neapolitan stevedore rolls away on the wharf from the wheels of a passing cart.