A lodger on sufferance; left with nothing to pawn, and possessed of a shilling to sustain life till she gained an order for _The Album of Inventions_, Mary toiled up staircases with the specimen. To economise on remaining pounds may be managed with refinement; to be frugal of the last silver is possible with decency; but to be reduced to the depths of pence means a devilish hunger whose cravings cannot be stilled for more than an hour at a time, and a weakness that mounts from limbs to brain till the throat contracts, and the eyeballs ache from exhaustion. However fatigued her fruitless expeditions might have made her now, she went back to the publishing-house enduringly afoot, grudging every halfpenny, husbanding the meagre sum with the tenacity of deadly fear. The windows of the foreign restaurants with viands temptingly displayed and tastefully garnished, the windows of the English cook-shops, into which the meats were thrown, enchanted her eye as she would never have believed that food could have the power to do. She understood what starvation was; began to understand how people could be brought to thieve by it, and exculpated them for doing so. Without her clothes becoming abruptly shabby, the aspect of the woman deteriorated from her internal consciousness. She carried herself less confidently; she lost the indefinable air that distinguishes the freight from the flotsam on the sea of life. Little things sent the fact home to her. Drivers ceased to lift an inquiring fore-finger when she passed a cab-rank, and once, when an address on her list proved to be a private house, the servant asked her "Who from?" instead of "What name?" Inch by inch she fought for the ground that was slipping under her, affecting cheerfulness when the specimen was exhibited, and hiding desperation when she restored it, a failure, to its case. The sight of Victoria Street and its neighbourhood came to be loathsome to her. Often her instructions took her on to different floors of the same building day after day; and, fancying that the hall-porters divined why she reappeared so often, she entered with the misgiving that they might forbid her to ascend. It was no shock to her at last to issue from the lodging beggared. She had felt so long that the situation was inevitable that she accepted its coming almost apathetically. She faced the usual day, mounting the flights of stairs, and drooping down them, a shade the weaker for the absence of the pitiful breakfast. It was not until one o'clock that the hopelessness of routine was admitted. Then, the prospect of the journey to reach her room again was intimidating enough; she did not even return to Pattenden's; she went slowly back and lay down on the bed, managing to forget her hunger intermittently in snatches of sleep.