How tired I was!  Even baby was no longer light, and the parcel on my wrist had become as heavy as lead.

Towards four o’clock I came to a broad parapet which had strips of garden enclosed by railings and iron seats in front of them.  Utterly exhausted, my arms aching and my legs limp, I sank into one of these seats, feeling that I could walk no farther.

But after a while I felt better, and then I became aware that another woman was sitting beside me.

When I looked at her first I thought I had never in my life seen anything so repulsive.  She was asleep, and having that expressionless look which sleep gives, I found it impossible to know whether she was young or old.  She was not merely coarse, she was gross.  The womanhood in her seemed to be effaced, and I thought she was utterly brutalised and degraded.

Presently baby, who had also been asleep, awoke and cried, and then the woman opened her eyes and looked at the child, while I hushed her to sleep again.

There must be something in a baby’s face that has a miraculous effect on every woman (as if these sweet angels, fresh from God, make us all young and all beautiful), and it was even so at that moment.

Never shall I forget the transfiguration in the woman’s face when she looked into the face of my baby.  The expression of brutality and degradation disappeared, and through the bleared eyes and over the coarsened features there came the light of an almost celestial smile.

After a while the woman spoke to me.  She spoke in a husky voice which seemed to be compounded of the effects of rum and raw night air.

“That your’n,” she said.

I answered her.

“Boy or gel?”

I told her.

“’Ow old?”

I told her that too.

The woman was silent for a moment, and then, with a thickening of the husky voice, she said: 

“S’pose you’ll say I’m a bleedin’ liar, but I ’ad a kid as putty as that onct—­puttier.  It was a boy.  The nobbiest little b——­ as you ever come acrost.  Your’n is putty, but it ain’t in it with my Billie, not by a long chalk.”

I asked her what had become of her child.

“Lawst ’im,” she said.  “Used to give sixpence a week to the woman what ’ad ’alf the ’ouse with me to look after ‘im while I was workin’ at the fact’ry.  But what did the bleedin’ b——­ do?  Blimey, if she didn’t let ’im get run over by the dray from the brewery.”

“Killed?” I said, clutching at baby.

The woman nodded without speaking.

I asked her how old her child had been.

“More’n four,” she said.  “Just old enough to run a arrand.  It was crool.  Hit me out, I can tell you.  That kid was all I had.  Apple o’ my eye, in a manner of speakin’.  When it was gone there wasn’t much encouragement, was there?  The Favver from the Mission came jawin’ as ’ow Jesus ’ad taken ’im to ’Imself.  Rot!  When they put ’im down in old Bow I didn’t care no more for nothin’.  Monse and monse I walked about night and day, and the bleedin’ coppers was allus on to me.  They got their own way at last.  I took the pneumonier and was laid up at the London.  And when I got out I didn’t go back to the fact’ry neither.”