Already the smaller children were beginning to weary of play.  In narrow courts they lolled along on the flags, exhausted.  In wider streets, they sat quietly on door-steps or the kerb, or announced their discomfort in peevish wailings.  The elder children quarrelled still and swore from their playground, the gutter, but they avoided now the sun and instinctively sought the shade and it is pretty hot when a child minds the sun.  At shop doors, shopmen, sometimes shopwomen, came to wipe their warm faces and examine the sky with anxious eyes.  The day grow hotter and hotter.  Ned could feel the rising heat, as though he were in an oven with a fire on underneath.  Only the Chinese looked cool.

Nellie led the way, sauntering along, without hurrying.  Several times she turned down passages that Ned would hardly have noticed, and brought him out in courts closed in on all sides, from which every breath of air seemed purposely excluded.  Through open doors and windows he could see the inside of wretched homes, could catch glimpses of stifling bedrooms and close, crowded little kitchens.  Often one of the denizens came to door or window to stare at Nellie and him; sometimes they were accosted with impudent chaff, once or twice with pitiful obscenity.

The first thing that impressed him was the abandonment that thrust itself upon him in the more crowded of these courts and alley-ways and back-streets, the despairing abandonment there of the decencies of living.  The thin dwarfed children kicked and tumbled with naked limbs on the ground; many women leaned half-dressed and much unbuttoned from ground floor windows, or came out into the passage-ways slatternly.  In one court two unkempt vile-tongued women of the town wrangled and abused each other to the amusement of the neighborhood, where the working poor were huddled together with those who live by shame.  The children played close by as heedlessly as if such quarrels were common events, cursing themselves at each other with nimble filthy tongues.

“There’s a friend of mine lives here,” said Nellie, turning into one of these narrow alleys that led, as they could see, into a busier and bustling street.  “If you don’t mind we’ll go up and I can help her a bit, and you can see how one sort of sweating is done.  I worked at it for a spell once, when dressmaking was slack.  In the same house, too.”

She stopped at the doorway of one of a row of three-storied houses.  On the doorstep were a group of little children, all barefooted and more or less ragged in spite of evident attempts to keep some of them patched into neatness.  They looked familiarly at Nellie and curiously at Ned.

“How’s mother, Johnny?” asked Nellie of one of them, a small pinched little fellow of six or seven, who nursed a baby of a year or so old, an ill-nourished baby that seemed wilting in the heat.

“She’s working,” answered the little fellow, looking anxiously at Nellie as she felt in her pocket.