Johnson holding forth.
The locomotive has apparently just been run into the cleaning sheds,
and her fires have not had time to cool. They say that Mrs Johnson was a
"lady once," like many of her kind; that she is not a "bad woman"--that
is, not a woman of loose character--but gets money sent to her from
somewhere--from her "family," or her husband, perhaps. But when she
lets herself loose--or, rather, when the beer lets her loose--she is
a tornado and a terror in Red Rock Lane, and it is only her fierce,
practical kindness to her unfortunate or poverty-stricken sisters in her
sober moments that keeps her forgiven in that classic thoroughfare.
She can certainly speak "like a lady" when she likes, and like an
intelligent, even a clever, woman--not like a "woman of the world," but
as a woman who knew and knows the world, and is in hell. But now her
language is the language of a rough shearer in a "rough shed" on a
blazing hot day.

After a while my mate calls out to her:

"Oh! for God's sake give it a rest!"

Whereupon Mrs Johnson straightway opens on him and his ancestry, and
his mental, moral, and physical condition--especially the latter. She
accuses him of every crime known to Christian countries and some Asiatic
and ancient ones. She wants to know how long he has been out of jail
for kicking his wife to pieces that time when she was up as a witness
against him, and whether he is in for the same thing again? (She has
never set eyes on him, by the way, nor he on her.)

He calls back that she is not a respectable woman, and he knows all
about her.

Thereupon she shrieks at him and bangs and kicks at her door, and
demands his name and address. It would appear that she is a respectable
woman, and hundreds can prove it, and she is going to make him prove it
in open court.

He calls back that his name is Percy Reginald Grainger, and his town
residence is "The Mansions," Macleay Street, next to Mr Isaacs, the
magistrate, and he also gives her the address of his solicitor.

She bangs and shrieks again, and states that she will get his name from
the charge sheet in the morning and have him up for criminal libel,
and have his cell mate up as a witness--and hers, too. But just here
a policeman comes along and closes her wicket with a bang and cuts her
off, so that her statements become indistinct, or come only as shrieks
from a lost soul in an underground dungeon. He also threatens to cut us
off and smother us if we don