e lost all conscience and pity here
long ago. They have become utterly vile, and nothing on earth is
viler, more loathsome, and more insulting than their abuse. And you
are laying down everything here, unconditionally, youth and health and
beauty and hope, and at twenty-two you will look like a woman of
five-and-thirty, and you will be lucky if you are not diseased, pray to
God for that! No doubt you are thinking now that you have a gay time
and no work to do! Yet there is no work harder or more dreadful in the
world or ever has been. One would think that the heart alone would be
worn out with tears. And you won't dare to say a word, not half a word
when they drive you away from here; you will go away as though you were
to blame. You will change to another house, then to a third, then
somewhere else, till you come down at last to the Haymarket. There you
will be beaten at every turn; that is good manners there, the visitors
don't know how to be friendly without beating you. You don't believe
that it is so hateful there? Go and look for yourself some time, you
can see with your own eyes. Once, one New Year's Day, I saw a woman at
a door. They had turned her out as a joke, to give her a taste of the
frost because she had been crying so much, and they shut the door
behind her. At nine o'clock in the morning she was already quite
drunk, dishevelled, half-naked, covered with bruises, her face was
powdered, but she had a black-eye, blood was trickling from her nose
and her teeth; some cabman had just given her a drubbing. She was
sitting on the stone steps, a salt fish of some sort was in her hand;
she was crying, wailing something about her luck and beating with the
fish on the steps, and cabmen and drunken soldiers were crowding in the
doorway taunting her. You don't believe that you will ever be like
that? I should be sorry to believe it, too, but how do you know; maybe
ten years, eight years ago that very woman with the salt fish came here
fresh as a cherub, innocent, pure, knowing no evil, blushing at every
word. Perhaps she was like you, proud, ready to take offence, not like
the others; perhaps she looked like a queen, and knew what happiness
was in store for the man who should love her and whom she should love.
Do you see how it ended? And what if at that very minute when she was
beating on the filthy steps with that fish, drunken and
dishevelled--what if at that very minute she recalled the pure early