A girl raised in the shabby end of literary London decides to become a writer, and finds the price is everything she was raised to want. Locke's first novel, published in 1894, before the charming vagabonds made him rich - this one is harder and colder than anything he wrote afterwards, and its heroine is not rewarded for being good. Fifty-five plates by painters including Walter Sickert and Dante Gabriel Rossetti follow the story through the shabby streets, studios and salerooms of the London the heroine is trying to escape.