Sinopsis

EIGHT o'clock in the morning. Miss Ada Moss lay in a black iron bedstead, staring up at the ceiling. Her room, a Bloomsbury top-floor back, smelled of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before. "Oh, dear," thought Miss Moss, "I am cold. I wonder why it is that I always wake up so cold in the mornings now. My knees and feet and my back–especially my back; it's like a sheet of ice. And I always was such a one for being warm in the old days. It's not as if I was skinny–I'm just the same full figure that I used to be. No, it's because I don't have a good hot dinner in the evenings." A pageant of Good Hot Dinners ed across the ceiling, each of them accompanied by a bottle of Nourishing Stout. . . .