workers find their vent in personal adornments or housework.
But women workers, at any rate of the very poor, have not even this solace. I call to mind one in particular, and this was her life. She was married—or perhaps she was not married—to a waterside labourer who, when he could work, made fair money. As a rule, he suffered from chronic rheumatism, and was next door to a cripple. She had four children under nine. She was a dark, untidy-haired woman with a face much pitted by small pox, and she had a horribly foul tongue. The room looked out upon a boxlike square of livid brick yards, a table was under a window, a sugar box held coals. Another, nailed above the mantel, held bits of bread, a screw of tea in white paper, a screw of sugar in blue, and a gobbet of margarine in a saucer. When her man was in work or bad enough to be in hospital, when, at any rate, he was out of the house, there would be no coal in the one box because he was not crouching over the fire, and a bit of bacon in the other because there was no fuel to pay for. What he made went for the rent. There was nothing else in the room except a mattress and, on a damp and discoloured wall, a coloured mezzotint of Perdita, the mistress of George IV. I do not know how she had come to be pasted up there.
Till the school bell rang the children worked at her side. I don't think they were ever either dressed for school or given breakfasts by her. She made matchboxes at 234d. the 144, and it was wonderful to watch her working—engrossed, expressionless, without a word,
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