“Oh, Jim,” she said.

The man ate stolidly some mess which had been stewing in a sauce-pan against his coming; he stared at his plate; his wife looked at him two or three times, with little startled glances, and then quite silently began to cry.  The builder was an uncouth little fellow with a rough, weather-beaten face and a long white scar on his forehead; he had large, stubbly hands.  Presently he pushed aside his plate as if he must give up the effort to force himself to eat, and turned a fixed gaze out of the window.  The room was at the top of the house, at the back, and one saw nothing but sullen clouds.  The silence seemed heavy with despair.  Philip felt that there was nothing to be said, he could only go; and as he walked away wearily, for he had been up most of the night, his heart was filled with rage against the cruelty of the world.  He knew the hopelessness of the search for work and the desolation which is harder to bear than hunger.  He was thankful not to have to believe in God, for then such a condition of things would be intolerable; one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless.

It seemed to Philip that the people who spent their time in helping the poorer classes erred because they sought to remedy things which would harass them if themselves had to endure them without thinking that they did not in the least disturb those who were used to them.  The poor did not want large airy rooms; they suffered from cold, for their food was not nourishing and their circulation bad; space gave them a feeling of chilliness, and they wanted to burn as little coal as need be; there was no hardship for several to sleep in one room, they preferred it; they were never alone for a moment, from the time they were born to the time they died, and loneliness oppressed them; they enjoyed the promiscuity in which they dwelt, and the constant noise of their surroundings pressed upon their ears unnoticed.  They did not feel the need of taking a bath constantly, and Philip often heard them speak with indignation of the necessity to do so with which they were faced on entering the hospital:  it was both an affront and a discomfort.  They wanted chiefly to be left alone; then if the man was in regular work life went easily and was not without its pleasures:  there was plenty of time for gossip, after the day’s work a glass of beer was very good to drink, the streets were a constant source of entertainment, if you wanted to read there was Reynolds’ or The News of the World; `but there, you couldn’t make out ’ow the time did fly, the truth was and that’s a fact, you was a rare one for reading when you was a girl, but what with one thing and another you didn’t get no time now not even to read the paper.’

The usual practice was to pay three visits after a confinement, and one Sunday Philip went to see a patient at the dinner hour.  She was up for the first time.

“I couldn’t stay in bed no longer, I really couldn’t.  I’m not one for idling, and it gives me the fidgets to be there and do nothing all day long, so I said to ’Erb, I’m just going to get up and cook your dinner for you.”