“Nellie’s a quick one,” she remarked to Ned.  “At the shop they always tell those who grumble what she earned one week.  Twenty-four and six, wasn’t it, Nellie?  But they don’t say she worked eighteen hours a day for it.”

Nellie flushed uneasily and Ned felt uncomfortable.  Both thought of the repayment of the latter’s friendly loan.  The girl made her machine rattle still more hurriedly to prevent any further remarks trending in that direction.  At last Mrs. Somerville, her tacking finished, got up and took the work from Nellie’s hands.

“I’m not going to take your whole morning,” she said.  “You don’t get many friends from the bush to see you, so just go away and I’ll get on.  I’m much obliged to you as it is, Nellie.”

Nellie did not object.  After wiping her hands, face and neck with her handkerchief she put on her gloves and hat.  The sharp-faced woman was already at the machine and amid the din, which drowned their good-byes, they departed as they came.  Ned felt more at ease when his feet felt the first step of the narrow creaking stairway.  It is hardly a pleasant sensation for a man to be in the room of a stranger who, without any unfriendliness, does not seem particularly aware that he is there.  They left the door open.  Far down the stifling stairs Ned could hear the ceaseless whirring of the machine driven by the woman who slaved ceaselessly for her children’s bread in this Sydney sink.  He looked around for the children when they got to the alley again but could not see them among the urchins who lolled about half-suffocated now.  The sun was almost overhead for they had been upstairs for an hour.  The heat in this mere canyon path between cliffs of houses was terrible.  Ned himself began to feel queerly.

“Let’s get out of this, Nellie,” he said.

“How would you like never to be able to get out of it?” she answered, as they turned towards the bustling street, opposite to the way they had previously come.

“Who’s that Mrs. Somerville?” he asked, not answering.

“I got to know her when I lived there,” replied Nellie.  “Her husband used to be well off, I fancy, but had bad luck and got down pretty low.  There was a strike on at some building and he went on as a laborer, blacklegging.  The pickets followed him to the house, abusing him, and made him stubborn, but I got her alone that night and talked to her and explained things a bit and she talked to him and next day he joined the union.  Then he got working about as a labourer, and one day some rotten scaffolding broke, and he came down with it.  The union got a few pounds for her, but the boss was a regular swindler who was always beating men out of their wages and doing anything to get contracts and running everything cheap, so there was nothing to be got out of him.”

“Did her husband die?”

“Yes, next day.  She had three children and another came seven months after.  One died last summer just before the baby was born.  She’s had a pretty hard time of it, but she works all the time and she generally has work.”