wasn't.

It would be useless to say she was not shocked. She was profoundly
and awfully shocked. Her whole state was perhaps largely the result
of shock: a sort of play-acting based on hysteria. But the dreadful
things she saw in the lying-in hospital, and afterwards, went deep,
and finished her youth and her tutelage for ever. How many infernos
deeper than Miss Frost could ever know, did she not travel? the
inferno of the human animal, the human organism in its convulsions,
the human social beast in its abjection and its degradation.

For in her latter half she had to visit the slum cases. And such
cases! A woman lying on a bare, filthy floor, a few old coats thrown
over her, and vermin crawling everywhere, in spite of sanitary
inspectors. But what did the woman, the sufferer, herself care! She
ground her teeth and screamed and yelled with pains. In her calm
periods she lay stupid and indifferent--or she cursed a little. But
abject, stupid indifference was the bottom of it all: abject, brutal
indifference to everything--yes, everything. Just a piece of female
functioning, no more.

Alvina was supposed to receive a certain fee for these cases she
attended in their homes. A small proportion of her fee she kept for
herself, the rest she handed over to the Home. That was the
agreement. She received her grudged fee callously, threatened and
exacted it when it was not forthcoming. Ha!--if they didn't have to
pay you at all, these slum-people, they would treat you with more
contempt than if you were one of themselves. It was one of the
hardest lessons Alvina had to learn--to bully these people, in their
own hovels, into some sort of obedience to her commands, and some
sort of respect for her presence. She had to fight tooth and nail
for this end. And in a week she was as hard and callous to them as
they to her. And so her work was well done. She did not hate them.
There they were. They had a certain life, and you had to take them
at their own worth in their own way. What else! If one should be
gentle, one was gentle. The difficulty did not lie there. The
difficulty lay in being sufficiently rough and hard: that was the
trouble. It cost a great struggle to be hard and callous enough.
Glad she would have been to be allowed to treat them quietly and
gently, with consideration. But pah--it was not their line. They
wanted to be callous, and if you were not callous to match, they
made a fool of you and prevented your doing your