Two

 The crisp morning drew the cold breath out, only it must have been warm
because of the cloudy smoke, stealing like the drag on a cigar when the
conoisseur tries for air again. The free things all adorned the morning, the
bird calls competing with the car horns that pushed thru the gluey snail
lines of London traffic.
 Matlida could have been going to the park for another secret rendezvous
with Robert or she could have been going to Buckwheat Barn to check up
on the situation at the squat. Whatever it was, it was always one extreme
or the other, either to meet a landed gentry confidente or to confide again
with her artist types surviving on bread and butter.
 She passed Euston and she passed Kings Cross. On cold mornings like
these it was her wont to walk, to where she had not decided just yet. She
passed all the landmarks she had read of in books, some of those not
landmarks anymore for the books were old. Stll, the derelict relics of
streets were still dear to her.
 Even the cafe's were named after the characters in the ancient periodicals
when the newspapers purveyed literature amongst its curios pages. The
cheaper the cafe the more likely it would bear the name of a famed one
from the tales of London's grime.
 Streets that now had no houses on still bore names as if once the settings
for the initial inspirations for the works of the penmasters. Some were mere
alleys that conveyed nothing in them but lurking memories in the minds of
the penny faithful who still picked up priceless copies for peanuts in the
illiterate now markets of Petticoat Lane.