The houses of this class differ from one another but slightly. Excepting that the one in Balham was numbered "44," and that the street was called "Rosalie Road," Mamie could have found it easy to believe that she was re-installed in Wandsworth. It seemed to her sometimes as if the van that had removed the furniture had also brought the ground-floor parlour, with the miniature bay window overlooking the shrubs and the plot of mould. The back yard with the clothes prop, and the neighbours' yards with the continuous clatter, they too might have been transferred from Lavender Street; and so abiding was the clatter that even if she felt sleepy at nine o'clock, it was useless to go to bed before eleven. In view of this unintermittent necessity for back yards, she wondered how the inmates of more expensive houses for which back yards were not provided managed to support the deficiency. The women that she viewed, from the bedroom, among the clothes lines, or across the plot of mould, as they went forth with string bags, might have been the Lavender Street tenants. And were they not the Lavender Street children, these who on week-days swung, unkempt, on the little creaking gates along the road, and on Sundays walked abroad in colours so grotesquely unsuited to them? Such houses are, for the most part, happily, the crown of lives too limited to realise their limitations--too unsuccessful to be aware that they have failed. To Rosalie Road, Balham, with her Aunt Lydia for companion, the divorced woman at the age of twenty-six retired to remember that she had once hoped to be an artist, and had had the opportunity of being happy. To-day she hoped for nothing. There was no scope for hope. If she could have awakened to find herself famous, her existence would have been coloured a little--though she knew that fame could not satisfy her now as it would once have done--but the ability to labour for distinction was gone. She was apathetic, she had no interest in anything. When six months had passed, she regarded death as the only event to which she could still look forward; when she had been here a year, a glimmer of relief entered into her depression--the doctor who had attended her, and sounded her lungs, told her that she "must take care of herself."