“See,” she whispered, taking a card from her breast, after a furtive glance towards the door.  “I sent two shillings to have her photograph taken and the Matron has just sent it.”

It was the picture of a beautiful baby girl, and I found it easy to praise her.

“I suppose you see her constantly, don’t you?” I said.

The girl’s face dropped.

“Only on visiting days, once a month, and not always that,” she answered.

“But how can you live without seeing her oftener?” I asked.

“Matter o’ means,” she said sadly.  “I pay five shillings a week for her board, and the train is one-and-eight return, so I have to be careful, you see, and if I lost my place what would happen to baby?”

I was very low and tired and down when I resumed my walk.  But when I thought for a moment of taking omnibuses for the rest 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.