The day turned out to be a very tiring one for her, and Eve found out how abominably uncomfortable London can be when one has no room of one’s own to go to, and no particular business to do. She just drifted about till she was tired, and then the problem was to find something upon which to sit. She spent the latter part of the morning in the gardens below Charing Cross Station, and then it began to rain. Lunch cost her threepence—half a scone and butter, and a glass of milk. She dawdled over it, but rain was still falling when she came out again into the street. A station waiting-room appeared to be her only refuge, for it was a sixpenny day at the National Gallery, and as she sat for two hours on a bench, wondering whether the weather was going to make the experiment she contemplated a highly realistic and unpleasant test of what a wet night was like when spent on one of the Embankment seats. The weather cleared about four o’clock, and Eve went across to a tea-shop, and spent another threepence on a cup of tea and a slice of cake. She had made a point of making the most of her last breakfast at the hotel, but she began to feel abominably hungry, with a hunger that revolted against cake. After tea she walked to Hyde Park, sat there till within half an hour of dusk, and then wandered back down Oxford Street, growing hungrier and hungrier. It was a very provoking sign of health, but if one part of her clamoured for food, her body, as a whole, protested that it was tired. The sight of a restaurant made her loiter, and she paused once or twice in front of some confectionery shop, and looked at the cakes in the window. But sweet stuffs did not tempt her. They are the mere playthings of people who are well fed. She found that she had a most primitive desire for good roast meat, beef for preference, swimming in brown gravy, and she accepted her appetite quite solemnly as a phenomenon that threw an illuminating light upon the problems of existence. Exploring a shabbier neighbourhood she discovered a cheap cook-shop with a steaming window and a good advertising smell. There was a bill of fare stuck up in the window, and she calculated that she could spend another three pennies. Sausages and mashed potatoes were to be had for that sum, and in five minutes she was sitting at a wooden table covered with a dirty cloth, and helping herself to mustard out of a cracked glass pot. It was quite a carnal experience, and she came out refreshed and much more cheerful, telling herself with naive seriousness that she was splitting life up into its elements. Food appeared to be a very important problem, and hunger a lust whose strength is unknown save to the very few, yet she was so near to her real self that she was on the edge of laughter. Then it occurred to her that she was not doing the thing thoroughly, that she had lapsed, that she ought to have started the night hungry.