2And so it goes on.
Dorothy endured this life for ten days – to be exact, nine days and ten nights. It was hard to see what else she could do. Her father, seemingly, had abandoned her altogether, and though she had friends in London who would readily have helped her, she did not feel that she could face them after what had happened, or what was supposed to have happened. And she dared not apply to organized charity because it would almost certainly lead to the discovery of her name, and hence, perhaps, to a fresh hullabaloo about the ‘Rector’s Daughter’.
So she stayed in London, and became one of that curious tribe, rare but never quite extinct – the tribe of women who are penniless and homeless, but who make such desperate efforts to hide it that they very nearly succeed; women who wash
