under the sun; and even if it begins at home it ain't ever
content to stop there over night."

Standing there in the dim street, before the silent rows of bleak houses
with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen
stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him. For the
first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world,
with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities.
This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon
Vetch! These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human
experience. They knew, while he and his kind only imagined. With a
sensation as acute as physical nausea, a sensation that the thought of
the Germans used to bring when he was in the trenches, there swept over
him a memory of the social hysteria which had followed, like a mental
pestilence or famine, in the track of the war. The moral platitudes, the
sentimental philanthropy, and the hypocritical command of conscience to
put all the world, except our own cellars, in order, where were these
impulses now in a time which had gone mad with the hatred of work and
the craving for pleasure? Yet he had once thought that he was returning
to a world which could be rebuilt on a foundation of justice, and it was
this lost belief, he knew, which had made him bitter in spirit and
unfair in judgment.

The gate swung back with a grating noise, and they entered the yard, and
walked over scattered papers and empty bottles to the narrow flight of
brick steps, which led from the ground to the area in front of the
basement dining-room. As Stephen descended by the light from the
dust-laden window, a chill dampness rose like a fog from the earth below
and filled his nostrils and mouth and throat--a dampness which choked
him like the effluvium of poverty. Glancing in from the area a moment
later, he saw a scantily furnished room, heated by an open stove and
lighted by a single jet of gas, which flickered in a thin greenish
flame. In the centre of the room a pine table, without a cloth, was laid
for supper, and three small children, in chairs drawn close together,
were impatiently drumming with tin spoons on the wood. A haggard woman,
in a soiled blue gingham dress, was bringing a pot of coffee from the
adjoining room; and in one corner, on a sofa from which the stuffing
sagged in bunches, a man sat staring vacantly at a hole in the rag
carpet. Tied in a high chai