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On a certain cold winter morning Hester darted across the wet pavement from the brougham to the untidy entrance of Museum Buildings where Rachel still lived.  It was a miserable day.  The streets and bare trees looked as if they had been drawn in in ink, and the whole carelessly blotted before it was dry.  All the outlines were confused, blurred.  The cold penetrated to the very bones of the shivering city.

Rachel had just come in, wet and tired, bringing with her a roll of manuscript to be transcribed.  A woman waiting for her on the endless stone stairs had cursed her for taking the bread out of her mouth.

“He always employed me till you came,” she shrieked, shaking her fist at her, “and now he gives it all to you because you’re younger and better-looking.”

She gave the woman as much as she dared spare, the calculation did not take long, and went on climbing the stairs.

Something in the poor creature’s words, something vague but repulsive in her remembrance of the man who paid her for the work by which she could barely live, fell like lead into Rachel’s heart.  She looked out dumbly over the wilderness of roofs.  The suffering of the world was eating into her soul; the suffering of this vast travailing East London, where people trod each other down to live.

“If any one had told me,” she said to herself, “when I was rich, that I lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow-creatures, that my virtue and ease and pleasure were bought by their degradation and toil and pain, I should not have believed it, and I should have been angry.  If I had been told that the clothes I wore, the food I ate, the pen I wrote with, the ink I used, the paper I wrote on—­all these, and everything I touched, from my soap to my match-box, especially my match-box, was the result of sweated labor, I should not have believed it, I should have laughed.  But yet it is so.  If I had not been rich once myself I should think as all these people do, that the rich are devils incarnate to let such things go on.  They have the power to help us.  We have none to help ourselves.  But they never use it.  The rich grind the poor for their luxuries with their eyes shut, and we grind each other for our daily bread with our eyes open.  I have got that woman’s work.  I have struggled hard enough to get it, but, though I did not realize it, I might have known that I had only got on to the raft by pushing some one else off it.”

Rachel looked out across the miles of roofs which lay below her garret window.  The sound was in her ears of that great whirlpool wherein youth and beauty and innocence go down quick day by day.  The wilderness of leaden roofs turned suddenly before her eyes into a sullen furrowed sea of shame and crime which, awaiting no future day of judgment, daily gave up its awful dead.

Presently Hester came in, panting a little after the long ascent of worn stairs, and dragging with her a large parcel.  It was a fur-lined cloak.  Hester spread it mutely before her friend, and looked beseechingly at her.  Then she kissed her, and the two girls clung together for a moment in silence.