My first business was to get my check cashed, and then find a room. I couldn't stay in this hotel as a married lady whose husband had brought her at seven o'clock on a winter's morning and deserted her before the day was five hours older. George had settled the bill, an act of generosity at which, now, I rather wondered. Luckily I had a few shillings in my pocket with which to pay the necessary tips. That done, I put on my hat and set out without further delay for the bank on which Sir Thomas Lothmere had drawn his check. It was pretty close by, in the Piccadilly District, and I walked.

The presentation of that check was really, I think, one of the most trying moments of my life. The cashier, a vulgar bourgeois man, looked me over with the most insulting deliberation, and I was made to feel at once that he supposed I had come by the check in no respectable fashion. I think old Sir Thomas was fairly good and proper; and even if, in former days, he had had occasion to make money presents to young ladies, I don't suppose he was fool enough to do it by check; so, perhaps, the worthy cashier had never before been called upon to hand over a sum of money to a very pretty girl in a smart hat, who presented a check signed by a widely respectable and elderly scientist. At last I got it; three crisp rivers and ten bright jingling sovereigns; and feeling much happier, and on a sounder footing with the world, I set out on quest number two-lodgings.

Theatrical folk, one of whom I now proposed to be, inhabited principally, I had heard, strange and unknown lands across the water, called Kennington and Camberwell and Brixton.