Nevertheless I confess I did mightily begrudge the great waste of time involved in my much travelling. In the summer it was not so bad, but in winter I and many more in like case, who for motives of economy got to our respective places of employment long before we could get in, suffered much from lack of shelter from cold and wet. Just one of the many unconsidered evils of living in a vast and over-crowded city. My extra work of picture framing suffered also, not merely because customers in my new neighbourhood were exceedingly scarce, everybody being so poor, but because of the long, long distance I had to fetch materials, especially glass, which in the crowded trains at night was a most ticklish and brittle load. I cannot now realise definitely the sudden rushes I used to make through the heart of the city at the busiest hour of the evening, my struggle with the clambering crowds up the steep stairs in Fenchurch Street Station, and the journey homewards in the close-packed, reeking compartment, dreading every moment lest a lurch of the train should damage my precious burden. It is all like some hideous nightmare, those wet and foggy nights when my lungs seemed fit to burst with coughing, and all my senses warned me to go slow, while my needs spurred me, and many times I had to stop and remember how many were in far more evil case than myself, or I should have indeed fallen by the wayside. Yet this life too I endured for three years, at the end of which time I was fully convinced that living so far away from my daily work was for me at anyrate a profound mistake. Also I had another child and was in consequence driven harder than ever, was more desirous than ever to have some steady auxiliary to my exiguous income, some means of getting clear of that furniture incubus which kept my nose to the grindstone. Besides all these things I had often in winter, despite my early leaving home, to spend several hours on the way to the city by reasons of floods, to which our neighbourhood then seemed particularly liable, and had been curtly warned by the Powers above me that I would do well to move nearer to my work if I wished to retain it. Which warnings gave me a cold chill at the heart, for although I was in age not much past thirty, I was already beginning to feel old from the strain of living, and I knew how scanty were the chances of getting another such berth as mine should I lose the one I had now got.