“Now then,” interrupted the Matron, taking two of the women and leading them back to their places.  “What good would a ha’penny do to any of you?” She touched two other women, and they retired grumbling to their seats, all except one tall, bony old creature, with a frightful palsy, who kept hold of Anne by the arm, repeating in a voice which was more like an angry scream than the whisper which her deaf ears imagined it to be.

“Those other women’ll all beg from you.  They’d take the bread out of anybody’s mouth.  Give me a ha’penny Missis, only a ha’penny,” and her avaricious, bony hand pinched Anne’s arm tightly as though she already clutched the coin.  The Matron, using both her own hands, unfastened her hands as she might have done a knot.  The old woman shook with rage and palsy, and fell rather than sat down on her seat under the flowering geraniums in the window.

“Now, I knew there was somebody strange in the room,” said the blind woman.  “Just let me have a look at her.”

She tucked her knitting needles into her apron-string.  She had been for many years in the workhouse infirmary, where she knitted and repaired the thick stockings worn by the inmates.  She had become a kind of pride of the ward.  Beyond the misfortune of her blindness she had no defect, and her mind was alert and cheerful.

“She calls it ‘looking,’” said the Matron with a laugh.  “Just you see her knitting, Miss Hilton.  She’s re-footing those stockings.  See if you can tell where she’s patched them.”  She took up a bright blue stocking from the bench.  The blind woman took the other end and felt it carefully.

“That’s not my work,” she said with amused contempt.  “It’s too like patchwork.  Here’s mine.”

Anne took the stocking and looked.  “It’s beautiful,” she said.  “I could never have told there was a join.”  The blind woman’s hand touched her arm and wandered slowly upwards, over her face and neck and head.

“I’ve not seen you before, have I?” she said.  “No, I don’t think I have.”

The Matron had already turned to leave the room.  Anne, held by the blind woman, looked again round the big room with its clean floor and battered inmates.  The uneventful peace broken by the bickering of the old women, the babies bringing a double burden to their mothers, the blind woman, to whom all days were alike, seemed to be imprisoned for ever.

She followed the Matron into the courtyard.  Several men in bottle-green corduroys loitered there, and a tiny old woman shrivelled and imbecile, who ran to Anne the moment she appeared, holding her skirts high to her knees, skipping on one foot and then on the other.

“I’ll dance for a ha’penny!  I’ll dance for a ha’penny!” she whined.

“Go on! dance, old lady,” said one of the men who was carrying an empty drawer, which had just been scrubbed, to dry in the sunshine of the yard.  He set it down, end upwards, and stood expectantly.  The two other men paused also.