Ned wanted to give the blind girl something but he felt ashamed to give before Nellie.  He fingered a half-crown in his pocket, with a bushman’s careless generosity.  By skilful manoeuvring and convenient yielding to the pressure of the crowd he managed to get near the blind girl as she finished her hymn.  Nellie turned round, looking away—­he thought afterwards:  was it intentionally?—­and he slipped his offering into the singer’ fingers like a culprit.  Then he walked off hastily with his companion, as red and confused as though he had committed some dastardly act.  Just as they reached the second arcade they heard another discordant hymn rise amid the shuffling din.

There were no street-walkers in Paddy’s Market, Ned could see.  He had caught his foot clumsily on the dress of one above the town-hall, a dashing demi-mondaine with rouged cheeks and unnaturally bright eyes and a huge velvet-covered hat of the Gainsborough shape and had been covered with confusion when she turned sharply round on him with a “Now, clumsy, I’m not a door-mat.”  Then he had noticed that the sad sisterhood were out in force where the bright gas-jets of the better-class shops illuminated the pavement, swaggering it mostly where the kerbs were lined with young fellows, fairly-well dressed as a rule, who talked of cricket and race horses and boating and made audible remarks concerning the women, grave and gay, who passed by in the throng.  Nearing the poorer end of George-street, they seemed to disappear, both sisterhood and kerb loungers, until near the Haymarket itself they found the larrikin element gathered strongly under the flaring lights of hotel-bars and music hall entrances.  But in Paddy’s Market itself there were not even larrikins.  Ned did not even notice anybody drunk.

He had seen drinking and drunkenness enough that day.  Wherever there was poverty he had seen viciousness flourishing.  Wherever there was despair there was a drowning of sorrow in drink.  They had passed scores of public houses, that afternoon, through the doors of which workmen were thronging.  Coming along George street, they had heard from more than one bar-room the howling of a drunken chorus.  Men had staggered by them, and women too, frowsy and besotted.  But there was none of this in Paddy’s Market.  It was a serious place, these long dingy arcades, to which people came to buy cheaply and carefully, people to whom every penny was of value and who had none to throw away, just then at least, either on a brain-turning carouse or on a painted courtesan.  The people here were sad and sober and sorrowful.  It seemed to Ned that here was collected, as in the centre of a great vortex, all the pained and tired and ill-fed and wretched faces that he had been seeing all day.  The accumulation of misery pressed on him till it sickened him at the heart.  It felt as though something clutched at his throat, as though by some mechanical means his skull was being tightened on his brain.  His thoughts were interrupted by an exclamation from Nellie.