Her long waking reverie of that night did not concern itself with the
people she had been with. It was fully occupied with the place. Her
mind mounted from floor to floor of the handsome house, which
represented so much money, reviewing and appraising the furniture,
speculating on the separate and collective value of the plate, the
mirrors, the hangings, the decorations. Thousands and thousands of
pounds, she thought, hundreds and hundreds of times more money than
she had ever seen, and nothing to do for it all. Those girls who lived
among it, what had they done that they should have all of it? Why had
she, whose mother needed it so much, who could so well appreciate it,
none of it? Marian's last thought 'before she fell asleep that night
was, not only that money was a great thing, but that almost anything
would be worth doing to get money.
CHAPTER VI.
BREAD-SEEKING.
There are few streets in London better known to that large army of
martyrs, the genteelly poor, than those which run northward from the
Strand, and are lost in the two vast tracts of brick known under the
name of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Lodging-house keepers do not
affect these streets, preferring the narrow no-thoroughfares on the
other side of the Strand, abutting on the river, streets eternally
ringing with the hoarse voice of the costermonger, who descends on one
side and ascends on the other, eternally echoing to the grinding of
the organ-man, who gets through his entire _répertoire_ twice over
during his progress to the railing overlooking the Embankment, and his
return to the pickle-shop at the top, eternally haunted by the
beer-boy and the newspaper-boy, by postmen infuriated with wrongly
addressed letters, and by luggage-laden cabs. In the streets bearing
northward no costermonger screams and no organ is found; the denizens
are business-people, and would very soon put a stop to any such
attempt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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