Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/198

 

HE was not a bad girl, not really. It simply never occurred to her that there was anything wrong, not very wrong, in the way she lived. And so she often remarked to Teena Bitts, "I'm not a tart proper, I never went off with a man that I didn't meet proper in Winterbottom's place." The pavement knew her not although she was well known to the patrons of the Pot and Pie, a sort of restaurant and public house and rendezvous of bookmakers on the city side of Bayswater. She had been ruined at sixteen in an areaway while her mother was away scrubbing the stairs of the Houses of Parliament, and when the same mother discovered Bessie's error and its impending result, she sought out the man and made him right the wrong. Technically Bessie's child (which died) had a father, but substantially Bessie had no husband, for he disappeared two days after the ceremony and was never heard of again.

But marriage did not make of Bessie an honest woman. She went her way as before and in a few months Mrs. Cudlip, her mother, reported to her charring friends that Bessie's husband had returned and that Bessie had lost her position at the Pot and Pie. In four months Bessie gave birth to what her mother called "a little girl," and Bessie went back to work leaving the baby to be cared for by a childless couple who lived in Hammersmith and later adopted it. Before Bessie was twenty-four the same