cumber ye the earth? Why, in God's name? I wish I could help you off it. Four. Why should there be four of you, all alike?" He glanced up at their faces, heavy-eyed, smooth-cheeked, crimson-mouthed faces. He scowled at them. Beasts. A little later he singled out one walking with a thin, undersized youth. Her skirt was very short. Her calves large, caught inward abruptly at knee and ankle. Her feet ridiculously short. Oh, the grotesque shape of her! Why should she exist? Why, oh why? How could the spotted-faced youth endure her?
The darkness of his brow deepened. He kept his eyes on the pavement, trying not to see the women. But presently he was jostled by one. He almost staggered, her progress had been so relentless, so direct. He turned his head and his angry eyes swept her. He saw her heavy middle-aged legs, her huge, pallid, aggressive face, her heavy breasts, smothered beneath a brassière, her close hat pulled over one eye, the other eye glowering through horn-rimmed spectacles. Why, oh, why should she exist? Why cumber ye the earth, fat beast? They exchanged looks. She thought: "Oh, if we could only really enforce the law to protect lovely young men like that! I'm sure he's been drinking. He stumbled right against me."
There was no air. The air seemed to have been sucked out of the street, leaving it a vacuum through which a dreamlike procession marched, a procession so dreamlike that it required no air. The faces, the legs, passed in a blur before Eden's eyes, until at last the form of an old woman stood out clearly. She was in rusty black, wearing an old-fashioned bonnet, the strings of which were tied in a greasy bow beneath her withered, jutting chin. Her slate-coloured eyes, which had once been as blue as Eden's, were fixed in the unseeing stare of one who had looked too long on life and could bear to look no more. Her sunken upper lip gnawed always the pendulous lower one. The turned-out toes of her large shoes could barely be seen beneath the heavy width of her draggled skirt. Instantly she appeared as something precious to Eden.
