wed and two troubled minds
wondered how they would be able to live without her.

I knew her well; it was my privilege to give her some happiness and some
change from grime and gloom, to take her away sometimes from the wayward
shuttle and rattling machine. I knew that she would have selected such
a death could she have chosen, for she dreaded the parish. I think, too,
that she would have wished for her old machine to be buried with her,
and for its silent shuttle to be beside her in her coffin. To her it was
a companion, and for it her husband died. Twenty-one years the machine
and herself had lived with each other and for each other. Sharing
with each other's toil, if not each other's hopes and fears! Working!
working! unceasingly through life--in death and rest they were not
divided.

It was a blessed thing that her machine partner required no food, or
life would have been even more serious than it was. But it had its
whims and its moods, sometimes it resented everlasting work at
three-half-pence per hour for the pair of them, and it "jibbed." But a
little oil and a soothing word, and, it must be feared, sometimes with a
threat, and the old thing went again.

Surely it will be sacrilege for any one else to sit upon that old chair
and try to renew the life and motion of the old machine!

It is strange that this oppression of women which is the cause of my
greatest sorrow should also be the cause of my keenest joy. But it is
so! And why? Because I number two thousand of these underworld women
slaves among my personal friends, and I am proud of it! The letters I
have given are a few out of hundreds that I have received. I know these
women as few know them. I know their sufferings and their virtues, their
great content and their little requirements. I know that they have the
same capabilities for happiness as other people, and I know that they
get precious little chance of exercising those capabilities. Strange
again, I get no begging letters from them, though I do from others who
are better placed. I declare it to be wonderful! This endurance and
patience of London's miserably paid women. I tell you that I am the
happiest man alive! Why? Because during the present year a thousand
of my poor friends from the underworld came up for a time and had a
fortnight, a whole fortnight's rest each with food and comfort in a
beautiful rest home by the sea. For kind friends have enabled me to
build one for them and for them alone