But on her forehead sits a fire:

    She sets her forward countenance

    And leaps into the future chance,

Submitting all things to desire.

—Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

Exeter, a hundred years ago, was a great deal farther from the capital than it is today; and it therefore still provided for itself some of the wicked amenities all Britain now flocks to London to enjoy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the city had a red light quarter in 1867; for all that it had a distinctly louche area, rather away from the center of the town and the carbolic presence of the Cathedral. It occupied a part of the city that slopes down towards the river, once, in the days (already well past in 1867) when it was a consider-able port, the heart of Exeter life. It consisted of a warren of streets still with many Tudor houses, badly lit, malodorous, teeming. There were brothels there, and dance halls and gin places; but rather more frequent were variously undone girls and women—unmarried mothers, mistresses, a whole popula-tion in retreat from the claustrophobic villages and small towns of Devon. It was notoriously a place to hide, in short; crammed with cheap lodging houses and inns like that one described by Sarah in Weymouth, safe sanctuaries from the stern moral tide that swept elsewhere through the life of the country. Exeter was, in all this, no exception—all the larger provincial towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of female wounded in the battle for uni-versal masculine purity.

In a street on the fringe of this area there stood a row of Georgian terrace houses. No doubt they had when built enjoyed a pleasant prospect down towards the river. But warehouses had gone up and blocked that view; the houses had most visibly lost self-confidence in their natural elegance. Their woodwork lacked paint, their roofs tiles, the door panels were split. One or two were still private residences; but a central block of five, made shabbily uniform by a blasphemous application of dull brown paint to the original brick, declared themselves in a long wooden sign over the central doorway of the five to be a hotel—Endicott’s Family Hotel, to be precise. It was owned, and administered (as the wooden sign also informed passers-by) by Mrs. Martha Endicott, whose chief characteristic may be said to have been a sublime lack of curiosity about her clientele. She was a thoroughly Devon woman; that is, she did not see intending guests, but only the money their stay would represent. She classified those who stood in her little office off the hall accordingly: ten-shillinger, twelve-shillinger, fifteener, and so on ... the prices referring to the charge per week. Those accustomed to being fifteen shillings down every time they touch a bell in a modern hotel must not think that her hotel was cheap; the normal rent for a cottage in those days was a shilling a week, two at most. Very nice little houses in Exeter could have been rented for six or seven shillings; and ten shillings a week for the cheapest room made Endicott’s Family, though without any obvious justification beyond the rapacity of the proprietress, on the choice side.

It is a gray evening turning into night. Already the two gaslamps on the pavement opposite have been pulled to brightness by the lamplighter’s long pole and illumine the raw brick of the warehouse walls. There are several lights on in the rooms of the hotel; brighter on the ground floor, softer above, since as in so many Victorian houses the gaspipes had been considered too expensive to be allowed upstairs, and there oil lamps are still in use. Through one ground-floor window, by the main door, Mrs. Endicott herself can be seen at a table by a small coal fire, poring over her Bible—that is, her accounts ledger; and if we traverse diagonally up from that window to another in the endmost house to the right, a darkened top-floor window, whose murrey curtains are still not drawn, we can just see a good example of a twelve-and-sixer—though here I mean the room, not the guest.

It is really two rooms, a small sitting room and an even smaller bedroom, both made out of one decent-sized Geor-gian room. The walls are papered in an indeterminate pattern of minute bistre flowers. There is a worn carpet, a round-topped tripod table covered by a dark green rep cloth, on the corners of which someone had once attempted—evidently the very first attempt—to teach herself embroidery; two awkward armchairs, overcarved wood garnished by a tired puce velvet, a dark-brown mahogany chest of drawers. On the wall, a foxed print of Charles Wesley, and a very bad watercolor of Exeter Cathedral—received in reluctant part payment, some years before, from a lady in reduced circum-stances.

Apart from a small clatter of appliances beneath the tiny barred fire, now a sleeping ruby, that was the inventory of the room. Only one small detail saved it: the white marble surround of the fireplace, which was Georgian, and showed above graceful nymphs with cornucopias of flowers. Perhaps they had always had a faint air of surprise about their classical faces; they certainly seemed to have it now, to see what awful changes a mere hundred years could work in a nation’s culture. They had been born into a pleasant pine-paneled room; now they found themselves in a dingy cell.

They must surely, if they had been capable, have breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened and the hitherto absent occupant stood silhouetted in the doorway. That strange-cut coat, that black bonnet, that indigo dress with its small white collar ... but Sarah came briskly, almost eagerly in.

This was not her arrival at the Endicott Family. How she had come there—several days before—was simple. The name of the hotel had been a sort of joke at the academy where she studied as a girl in Exeter; the adjective was taken as a noun, and it was supposed that the Endicotts were so multi-plied that they required a whole hotel to themselves.

Sarah had found herself standing at the Ship, where the Dorchester omnibuses ended their run. Her box was waiting; had arrived the previous day. A porter asked her where she was to go. She had a moment of panic. No ready name came to her mind except that dim remembered joke. A something about the porter’s face when he heard ............