Back in her room she laughed with horrid derision. And as soon as she was in bed the clockwork mice started to run round and round in her head. A plot! A plot! What a burning shame! What a burning shame! ... A few weeks earlier she had actually been bestowing situations on pitiful applicants. Now she herself had no situation and no prospect of any. She had never had to apply for a situation. She had not been educated to applying for situations. She could not imagine herself ever applying for a situation. She had not the least idea how to begin to try to get a situation. She passed the greater part of Sunday in bed, and in the evening went to church and felt serious and good. On Monday morning she visited the Post Office and filled up a withdrawal form for forty pounds. She had had a notion of becoming a companion to a rich lady, or private secretary to a member of Parliament. She would advertise. Good clothes, worn as she could wear them, would help her. (She could not face another situation in an office. No, she couldn’t.) The notion of a simpleton, of course! But she was still a simpleton. The notion, however, was in reality only a pretext for obtaining some good clothes. All her life she had desired more than anything a smart dress. There was never a moment in her life when she was less entitled to indulge herself; but she felt desperate. She was taking to clothes as some take to brandy. On the Wednesday she received the money: a colossal, a marvellous sum. She ran off with it and nervously entered a big shop in Wigmore Street; the shop was a wise choice on her part, for it combined smartness with a discreet and characteristic Englishness. Impossible to have the dangerous air of an adventuress in a frock bought at that shop! The next few days were spent in exactly fitting and adapting the purchases to her body. She had expended the forty pounds and drawn out eight more. Through the medium of the slavey she borrowed a mirror, and fixed it at an angle with her own so that she could see her back. She was so interested and absorbed that she now and then neglected to feel unhappy and persecuted. She neglected also to draw up an advertisement, postponing that difficult matter until the clothes should be finished. But the house gathered that Miss Share had got her new situation. One afternoon, early, returning home after a search for white elastic in Hammersmith, she saw Mr. Grig coming away from the house. She stood still, transfixed; she flushed hotly, and descried a beneficent and just God reigning in heaven. She knew she was saved; and the revulsion in her was nearly overwhelming. A miracle! And yet--not a miracle at all; for Mr. Grig was bound by every consideration of honour and decency to get into communication with her sooner or later. Her doubts of his integrity had been inexcusable.