Then, having thought out his thought, he strode to the middle door and flung it open. The room was dimly lit, which was just as well, for there was in it but one ornament which might have repaid a more exact scrutiny; and that was a girl, who, dressed for solitude in a faded blue _peignoir_, her fair hair loose about her shoulders, a copy of the _Sketch_ in her hands, lay negligently on a wretched sofa. She was a pretty girl; that has been remarked before; but then she had been dressed like a flower, a flower from a garden sweeter than the spacious garden of Mrs. Felix Waite, and now she was dressed like nothing at all; and the faded blue of her covering was stained by a flat yellow packet of cigarettes. She was obviously no lady, and had given up pretending she was. “You dirty beast! How dare you come here!” cried the pretty girl, amazement turning to disgust, disgust to anger. But the cavalier of the streets, still framed in the doorway, his head uncovered, only smiled at her. And in his smile there was no hint of apology for the intrusion which his hostess seemed to resent so deeply. “Good-evening, Betty,” said he, in a friendly way. “Just thought I’d come and look at you, you know. Pretty Betty! You last remarkably well, I must say. How are you, child?” And he advanced into the room, threw his hat on a chair, dug his hands into his pockets, and grinned at her again; while her eyes, pretty blue eyes hardened by despair, stared up at him in helpless anger. “Michael,” she said bitterly, “you are the world’s worst man. Why can’t you leave me alone?--my Gawd, why can’t you leave me alone?” And as her voice rose, her eyes swept him in utter contempt. “You poor kid, I _have_ left you alone,” he told her gently, wearily. The fact that the cavalier of the streets had at one time been a gentleman was apparent in the way he took abuse. Abuse made him tired. “I haven’t been near you for years, Betty, so it’s no good your handing me any rough stuff about _that_....” His gentleness provoked her. The pretty girl sat up in her disorder, and the expression on her face was not pretty. He smiled curiously, thinking of a very young man up at Magdalen College and of a very pretty girl at a flower-shop near the station, and how the young man had loved the pretty girl from a distance, until one day he had realised that the pretty girl was very willing to be loved by him; whereupon she had got the sack from the flower-shop, and had come up to London for to be a chorus-girl, and in due course the young man had forgotten her.... “Anyway,” he added, “I didn’t leave you so stranded as that Thomas Felix Waite fellow.” Shame that the blue of the pretty girl’s eyes was so hard, so wretched and so hard. “Oh, yes,” she sneered; “there ain’t much to choose between you two rotten gentlemen!” And she laughed; and then, because she was a girl, she sobbed. “Oh, Christ, why’ve I always been so wretched!”