The gaslit streets of Victorian London felt much safer than the dark alleyways to either side.

Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations. It is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed.

Then there was Ruby, who had been a wild child, willful, and determined to be everything her parents hated and feared.

In this chapter, I have used data taken from my own e-messages, supplemented by examples taken from messages sent to a younger generation, kindly supplied by my 23-year-old son and 26-year-old daughter. The desirability of a corpus of e-mail data is stressed by Johansson, and also Yates.