A Dancer In Gloves
The stage-door of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane emptied itself, as it did every night, in a particular order. First the scene-shifters, because they had nowhere to be that did not serve beer, and then the musicians, and then the corps de ballet, who came out in twos and threes with their hair still pinned up under plain woollen bonnets and their street-boots unbuttoned at the ankle. The last to leave were always the principals, and after them the dressers, and after them Mr. Cleaver the doorman, who set the chain across the inner door at twenty-three minutes past eleven and liked the clock to be consulted on the matter.
On the evening of the twenty-ninth of March, 1884, Phoebe Latham had come out of that door at ten minutes past eleven, in the company of two other girls of the corps. This Mr. Cleaver was later able to say with confidence, because Phoebe had stopped on the step to fasten the top button of her glove, and he had remarked to her that the fog was coming up thick from the river and she was to mind her step on the Strand. She had answered him that she meant to take the omnibus as far as Southampton Row and walk the rest, because she could not afford a cab that week. She had said it cheerfully, without self-pity. Mr. Cleaver recalled this because he approved of the cheer and disapproved of the walk.
She had not reached the rooms above the pawnshop in Brunswick