My heart was still strong (sharpened indeed into, poignancy) and I know I was not crying, for at one moment as I passed the mirror in a chemist’s window I caught sight of my face and it was fierce as flame.

At another moment, while I was hurrying along, I collided with a drunken woman who was coming out of a public-house with her arm about the neck of a drunken sailor.

“Gawd!  Here’s the Verging Mary agine!” she cried.

It was the woman who had carried baby, and when I tried to hurry past her she said: 

“You think I’m drunk, don’t you, dear?  So’am.  Don’t you never get drunk?  No?  What a bleedin’ fool you are!  Want to get out o’ this ’ere ’ole?  Tike my tip then—­gettin’ drunk’s on’y way out of it.”

Farther on I had to steer my way through jostling companies of young people of both sexes who were going (I thought) the same way as the woman—­girls out of the factories with their free walk, and their boisterous “fellers” from the breweries.

It was a cold and savage night.  As I approached the side street in which I lived I saw by the light of the arc lamps a small group of people, a shivering straggle of audience, with the hunched-up shoulders of beings thinly clad and badly fed, standing in stupid silence at the corner while two persons wearing blue uniforms (a man in a peaked cap and a young woman in a poke bonnet) sang a Salvation hymn of which the refrain was “It is well, it is well with my soul.”

The door of the Jew’s house was shut (for the first time in my experience), so I had to knock and wait, and while I waited I could not help but hear the young woman in the poke bonnet pray.

Her prayer was about “raising the standard of Calvary,” and making the drunkards and harlots of the East End into “seekers” and “soul yielders” and “prisoners of the King of Kings.”

Before the last words of the prayer were finished the man in the peaked cap tossed up his voice in another hymn, and the young woman joined him with an accordion: 

     “Shall we gather at the river,
     Where bright angel feet have trod. . . .”

The door was opened by the Jew himself, who, assuming a severe manner, said something to me in his guttural voice which I did not hear or heed, for I pushed past him and walked firmly upstairs.

When I had reached my room and lit the gas, I closed and locked the door, as if I were preparing to commit a crime—­and perhaps I was.

I did not allow myself to think of what I intended to do that night, but I knew quite well, and when at one moment my conscience pressed me hard something cried out in my heart: 

“Who can blame me since my child’s life is in danger?”

I opened my trunk and took out my clothes—­all that remained of the dresses I had brought from Ellan.  They were few, and more than a little out of fashion, but one of them, though far from gay, was bright and stylish—­a light blue frock with a high collar and some white lace over the bosom.