When the grey of morning began to show behind the blind Miriam's thoughts came back to the figure on the bed. Miss Dear was peacefully asleep lying on her back with her head thrown back upon the pillow. Her face looked stonily pure and stern; and colourless in the grey light. There was a sheen on her forehead like the sheen on the foreheads of old people. She had probably been asleep ever since the beginning of the stillness. Everybody was getting up. "London was getting up." That man in the _Referee_ knew what it was, that feeling when you live right _in_ London, of being a Londoner, the thing that made it _enough_ to be a Londoner, getting up, in London; the thing that made real Londoners different to everyone else, going about with a sense that made them _alive_. The very idea of living anywhere but in London, when one thought about it, produced a blank sensation in the heart. What was it I said the other day? "London's got me. It's taking my health and eating up my youth. It may as well have what remains...." Something stirred powerfully, unable to get to her through her torpid body. Her weary brain spent its last strength on the words, she had only half meant them when they were spoken. _Now_, once she was free again, to be just a Londoner she would ask nothing more of life. It would be the answer to all questions; the perfect unfailing thing, guiding all one's decisions. And an ill-paid clerkship was its best possible protection; keeping one at a quiet centre, alone in a little room, untouched by human relationships, undisturbed by the necessity of being anything. Nurses and teachers and doctors and all the people who were doing special things surrounded by people and talk were not Londoners. Clerks were, unless they lived in suburbs, the people who lived in St. Pancras and Bloomsbury and in Seven Dials and all round Soho and in all the slums and back streets everywhere were. She would be again soon ... not a woman ... a Londoner. She rose from her chair feeling hardly able to stand. The long endurance in the cold room had led to nothing but the beginning of a day without strength--no one knowing what she had gone through. Three days and nights of nursing Eve had produced only a feverish gaiety. It _was_ London that killed you. "I will come in at lunch-time" she scribbled on the back of an envelope, and left it near one of the hands outstretched on the coverlet. Outdoors it was quite light, a soft grey morning, about eight o'clock. People were moving about the streets. The day would be got through somehow. Tomorrow she would be herself again. 4 "Has she applied to the Association to which she belongs?"