The theatre, he had written, was in a place called Shoreditch; Eliza had had to sound out the word, letter by letter, to get the sense of it. “Shore,” she had said, and then “ditch.” Shore-ditch? Agnes had repeated. She pictured the bank of a river, silted, reed-frilled, a place where yellow flags might grow, and birds would nest, and then a ditch, a treacherously slippery sloped hole, with muddy water in the bottom. “Shore” and then “ditch.” The first part of the word a nice-sounding sort of place, the latter part horrible.
