When Victoria realised all of a sudden her loneliness in her island in Star Street, something like the fear of the hunted had driven her out into the streets. She was afraid to be alone, for not even books could save her from her thoughts, those hounds in full cry. In such moods she had walked the streets quickly, looking at nothing, maintaining her pace over hills. Now and then she had suddenly landed on a slum, caught sight of, all beery and bloody, through the chink of a black lane. But she shunned the flares, the wet pavement, the orange peel that squelched beneath her boots, afraid of the sight of too vigorous life. Unconsciously she had sought the drug of weariness, and the cunning bred of her dipsomania told her that the living were poor companions for her soul. And, when at times a man had followed her, his eye arrested by the lines of her face lit up by a gas lamp, he had soon tired of her quick walk and turned away towards weaker vessels. But even weariness, when abused, loses its power as a sedative. The body, at once hardened and satiated, demands more every day as it craves for increasing doses of morphia, for more food, more drink, more kisses, more, ever more. Thus Victoria had reached her last stage when, sitting alone in her room, she once more faced the emptiness where the ghosts of her dead past paced like caged beasts and the wraith of the day's work rattled its chains. From this, now a state of mental instead of physical exhaustion, she was seldom roused; and it needed an Edward come to judgment to stir her sleepy brain into quick passion. Again and again the events of the day would chase round and round maddeningly with every one of their little details sharp as crystals. Victoria could almost mechanically repeat some conversations, all trifling, similar, confined to half a dozen topics; she could feel, too, but casually as an odalisque, the hot wave of desire which surrounded her all day, evidenced by eyes that glittered, fastened on her hands as she served, on her face, the curve of her neck, her breast, her hips; eyes that devoured and divested her of her meretricious livery. And, worse perhaps than that big primitive surge which left her cold but unangered, the futility of others who bandied with her the daily threadbare joke, who wearied her mind with questions as to food, compelled her to sympathise with the vagaries of the weather or were arch, flirtatious and dragged out of her tired mind the necessary response. Even Butty and the moist warmth of him, even Stein with his flaccid surly face, were better in their grossness than these vapid youths, thoughtless, incapable of thought, incapable of imagining thought, who set her down as an inferior, as a toy for games that were not even those of men.