From the cheap print, the lurid relishing headlines, the blurred semi-grotesque photographs of criminals, the whole sinister underworld came swarming up at her. Creatures who lived within reaching grasp of the law, creatures who crawled into the papers.... Subterranean folk, dwelling where gas hissed and cisterns dripped, and half-starved cats slunk through the gutter. And they had faces with swollen lips and large, fierce eyes, and their names were not the names of people one knew, and their clothes were unfamiliar. Their last incoherent letters were printed in neat, straight, passionless lines down the column. Something more complex than just “the poor”; a twilight more sinister, where drunken sexless figures dealt each other blows with, oddly, implements that were meant for homely use, pokers, and rolling-pins and chairs. In this stunted sallow underworld, boys and girls actually killed themselves in sudden rages of love and despair. And the inhabitants were hungrier than ordinary hunger. “Any previous conviction?” asked the magistrate. “Two against the woman Hobbs, Your Worship.”... A world where women were known by their surnames to magistrate and policeman and court missionary.... To Ursula it seemed as though into the room had drifted a raw fog, and beyond it the strident yell of newsboys. Over a barrow of rusty old garments, a row of naphtha lights flapped uneasily ... a lad furtively running was pursued by two policemen.... He was wanted for theft.... As, breathing hard, he padded round the corner, Ursula saw his face ... Hal’s face! Hal had brought the underworld quite close to the Laburnums. He had done something which might--oh no! no!--which might get into the papers. Wild with panic, Ursula scrambled to her feet. What time was it? How long had she been squatting there with that horrible beastly paper, reading it and imagining things. It was getting dark. Six--seven o’clock. And Mr. Fennimore came at eight. And Aunt Lavvy was going to tell him, and he might think it his duty--as Stanley would--to tell the police. And Hal.... It wasn’t safe to wait a second longer. What had to be done was urgent. Without even a conscious glance of renunciation at her room, Ursula left it, and knocked at Aunt Lavvy’s door. “Come in.” With direct action, panic had vanished. She was confident now, and powerfully gentle, and even, with a tinting of irony, amused. Leaping ten or fifteen years of slow development to the grown-up Ursula she would undoubtedly become. “Aunt Lavvy, I wondered if you would be a darling”--Aunt Lavvy, with a stiffening of her concealed obstinacies, waited for the plea for Hal--“and visit me in my room. You see, I’ve lit my first fire--you remember my birthday present?--and it seems silly to sit in front of it by oneself, and, well, it would be ever so jolly if you came in for a little while,” with a rush of shy impulsiveness--calculated. Aunt Lavvy beamed like a cluster of little pink and silver suns.