t 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 anot