thin voice from somewhere.

Edward looked above and around him; nobody was visible.

'Who did you woant?' said the thin voice again.

He found now that the sound proceeded from below the grating covering
the basement window. He dropped his glance through the bars, and saw a
child's white face.

'Who did you woant?' said the voice the third time, with precisely the
same languid inflection.

'Mrs. Higgins,' said Edward.

'Third bell up,' said the face, and disappeared.

He pulled the third bell from the bottom, and was admitted by another
child, the daughter of the woman he was in search of. He gave the little
thing sixpence, and asked for her mamma. The child led him upstairs.

Mrs. Higgins was the wife of a carpenter who from want of employment
one winter had decided to marry. Afterwards they both took to drink,
and sank into desperate circumstances. A few chairs and a table were
the chief articles of furniture in the third-floor back room which they
occupied. A roll of baby-linen lay on the floor; beside it a pap-clogged
spoon and an overturned tin pap-cup. Against the wall a Dutch clock was
fixed out of level, and ticked wildly in longs and shorts, its entrails
hanging down beneath its white face and wiry hands, like the faeces of a
Harpy ('foedissima ventris proluvies, uncaeque manus, et pallida semper
ora'). A baby was crying against every chair-leg, the whole family of
six or seven being small enough to be covered by a washing-tub. Mrs.
Higgins sat helpless, clothed in a dress which had hooks and eyes in
plenty, but never one opposite the other, thereby rendering the
dress almost useless as a screen to the bosom. No workbox was visible
anywhere.

It was a depressing picture of married life among the very poor of a
city. Only for one short hour in the whole twenty-four did husband and
wife taste genuine happiness. It was in the evening, when, after
the sale of some necessary article of furniture, they were under the
influence of a quartern of gin.

Of all the ingenious and cruel satires that from the beginning till now
have been stuck like knives into womankind, surely there is not one so
lacerating to them, and to us who love them, as the trite old fact, that
the most wretched of men can, in the twinkling of an eye, find a wife
ready to be more wretched still for the sake of his company.

Edward hastened to despatch his errand.

Mrs. Higgins had lately pawned the workbox with other useless articles
o