The gate swung back with a grating noise, and they entered the yard, and walked over scattered papers and empty bottles to the narrow flight of brick steps, which led from the ground to the area in front of the basement dining-room.  As Stephen descended by the light from the dust-laden window, a chill dampness rose like a fog from the earth below and filled his nostrils and mouth and throat—­a dampness which choked him like the effluvium of poverty.  Glancing in from the area a moment later, he saw a scantily furnished room, heated by an open stove and lighted by a single jet of gas, which flickered in a thin greenish flame.  In the centre of the room a pine table, without a cloth, was laid for supper, and three small children, in chairs drawn close together, were impatiently drumming with tin spoons on the wood.  A haggard woman, in a soiled blue gingham dress, was bringing a pot of coffee from the adjoining room; and in one corner, on a sofa from which the stuffing sagged in bunches, a man sat staring vacantly at a hole in the rag carpet.  Tied in a high chair, which stood apart as if it were the pedestal of an idol, a baby, with the smooth unlined face not of an infant, but of a philosopher, was mutely surveying the scene.

More than anything else in the room, more even than the sodden hopelessness of the man’s expression, the hopelessness of neurasthenia, this baby, tied with a strip of gingham in his high chair, arrested and held Stephen’s attention.  Very pallid, with the pallor not of flesh but of an ivory image, with hair as thin and white as the hair of an old man, and eyes that were as opaque as blue marbles, the baby sat there, with its look of stoical philosophy and superhuman experience.  And this look said as plainly as if the tiny mute lips had opened and spoken aloud:  “I am tired before I begin.  I am old before I begin.  I am ending before I begin.”

Darrow knocked at the door, and the woman opened it with the coffee-pot still in her hand.

“So you’ve come back,” she said in a voice that was without surprise and without gratitude.

“I came back to ask what you’ve done about a place.  This gentleman is with me.  You don’t mind his stepping inside a minute?”

“Oh, no, I don’t mind.  I don’t mind anything.”  She drew back as she answered, and the two men entered the room and stood gazing at the stove with the look of embarrassment which the sight of poverty brings to the faces of the well-to-do.

“When are you moving?” asked Darrow, withdrawing his gaze from the glimmer of the embers in the stove, and fixing it on the steam that issued from the coffee-pot.

“In the morning.  We’ve found a cheaper place, though with rent going up every week, it looks as if we’d soon have nowhere worse to move to, unless it’s gaol alley.”  Her tone dripped bitterness, and the lines of her pale lips settled into an expression of scornful resignation.

Without replying to her words, Darrow nodded in the direction of the young man, who had never looked up, but sat in the same rigid attitude, with his vacant eyes staring at the hole in the carpet.