The girl's face dropped.

"Only on visiting days, once a month, and not always that," she answered.

"But how can you live without seeing her oftener?" I asked.

"Matter o' means," she said sadly. "I pay five shillings a week for her board, and the train is one-and-eight return, so I have to be careful, you see, and if I lost my place what would happen to baby?"

I was very low and tired and down when I resumed my walk. But when I thought for a moment of taking omnibuses for the rest of my journey I remembered the waitress's story and told myself that the little I had belonged to my child, and so I struggled on.

But what a weary march it was during the next two hours! I was in the East End now, and remembering the splendour of the West, I could scarcely believe I was still in London.

Long, mean, monotonous streets, running off to right and left, miles on miles of them without form or feature, or any trace of nature except the blue strips of sky overhead.

Such multitudes of people, often badly dressed and generally with set and anxious faces, hasting to and fro, hustling, elbowing, jostling each other along, as if driven by some invisible power that was swinging an unseen scourge.

No gracious courtesy here! A woman with a child in her arms was no longer a queen. Children were cheap, and sometimes it was as much as I could do to save myself from being pushed off the pavement.

The air seemed to smell of nothing but ale and coarse tobacco. And then the noise! The ceaseless clatter of carts, the clang of electric cars, the piercing shrieks of the Underground Railway coming at intervals out of the bowels of the earth like explosions out of a volcano, and, above all, the raucous, rasping, high-pitched voices of the people, often foul-mouthed, sometimes profane, too frequently obscene.

A cold, grey, joyless, outcast city, cut off from the rest of London by an invisible barrier more formidable than a wall; a city in which the inhabitants seemed to live cold, grey, joyless lives, all the same that they joked and laughed; a city under perpetual siege, the siege of Poverty, in the constant throes of civil war, the War of Want, the daily and hourly fight for food.

If there were other parts of the East End (and I am sure there must be) where people live simple, natural, human lives, I did not see them that day, for my course was down the principal thoroughfares only.

Those thoroughfares, telescoping each other, one after another, seemed as if they would never come to an end.

How tired I was! Even baby was no longer light, and the parcel on my wrist had become as heavy as lead.

Towards four o'clock I came to a broad parapet which had strips of garden enclosed by railings and iron seats in front of them. Utterly exhausted, my arms aching and my legs limp, I sank into one of these seats, feeling that I could walk no farther.

But after a while I felt better, and then I became aware that another woman was sitting beside me.

When I looked at her first I thought I had never in my life seen anything so repulsive. She was asleep, and having that expressionless look which sleep gives, I found it impossible to know whether she was young or old. She was not merely coarse, she was gross. The womanhood in her seemed to be effaced, and I thought she was utterly brutalised and degraded.

Presently baby, who had also been asleep, awoke and cried, and then the woman opened her eyes and looked at the child, while I hushed her to sleep again.

There must be something in a baby's face that has a miraculous effect on every woman (as if these sweet angels, fresh from God, make us all young and all beautiful), and it was even so at that moment.

Never shall I forget the transfiguration in the woman's face when she looked into the face of my baby. The expression of brutality and degradation disappeared, and through the bleared eyes and over the coarsened features there came the light of an almost celestial smile.

After a while the woman spoke to me. She spoke in a husky voice which seemed to be compounded of the effects of rum and raw night air.

"That your'n," she said.

I answered her.

"Boy or gel?"

I told her.

"'Ow old?"

I told her that too.

The woman was silent for a moment, and then, with a thickening of the husky voice, she said:

"S'pose you'll say I'm a bleedin' liar, but I 'ad a kid as putty as that onct--puttier. It was a boy. The nobbiest little b---- as you ever come acrost. Your'n is putty, but it ain't in it with my Billie, not by a long chalk."

I asked her what had become of her child.

"Lawst 'im," she said. "Used to give sixpence a week to the woman what 'ad 'alf the 'ouse with me to look after 'im while I was workin' at the fact'ry. But what did the bleedin' b---- do? Blimey, if she didn't let 'im get run over by the dray from the brewery."

"Killed?" I said, clutching at baby.

The woman nodded without speaking.

I asked her how old her child had been.

"More'n four," she said. "Just old enough to run a arrand. It was crool.

Hit me out, I can tell you. That kid was all I had. Apple o' my eye, in a manner of speakin'. When it was gone there wasn't much encouragement, was there? The Favver from the Mission came jawin' as 'ow Jesus 'ad taken 'im to 'Imself. Rot! When they put 'im down in old Bow I didn't care no more for nothin'. Monse and monse I walked about night and day, and the bleedin' coppers was allus on to me. They got their own way at last. I took the pneumonier and was laid up at the London. And when I got out I didn't go back to the fact'ry neither."

"What did you do?" I asked.

The woman laughed--bitterly, terribly.

"Do? Don't you _know_?"

I shook my head. The woman looked hard at me, and then at the child.

"Look here--are you a good gel?" she said.

Hardly knowing what she meant I answered that I hoped so

"'Ope? Don't you know _that_ neither?"

Then I caught her meaning, and answered faintly:

"Yes."

She looked searchingly into my eyes and said:

"I b'lieve you. Some gels is. S'elp me Gawd I don't know how they done it, though."

I was shuddering and trembling, for I was catching glimpses, as if by broken lights from hell, of the life behind--the wrecked hope, the shattered faith, the human being hunted like a beast and at last turned into one.

Just at that moment baby awoke and cried again. The woman looked at her with the same look as before--not so much a smile as a sort of haggard radiance.

Then leaning over me she blew puffs of alcoholic breath into baby's face, and stretching out a coarse fat finger she tickled her under the chin.