Mrs. Eagles continued to assist Amy as hitherto.  To save trouble, she came into the middle room for her meals, at these times always keeping as much of her face as possible hidden.  The children could not overcome a repulsion, a fear, excited by her veil and the muteness she preserved in their presence; several nights passed before little Annie got to sleep with any comfort.  Only with her father did Clara hold converse; in the evening he always sat alone with her for an hour.  She went out perhaps every third day, after dark, stealing silently down the long staircase, and walking rapidly until she had escaped the neighbourhood—­like John Hewett when formerly he wandered forth in search of her.  Her strength was slight; after half-an-hour’s absence she came back so wearied that the ascent of stairs cost her much suffering.

The economy prevailing in to-day’s architecture takes good care that no depressing circumstance shall be absent from the dwellings in which the poor find shelter.  What terrible barracks, those Farringdon Road Buildings!  Vast, sheer walls, unbroken by even an attempt at ornament; row above row of windows in the mud-coloured surface, upwards, upwards, lifeless eyes, murky openings that tell of bareness, disorder, comfortlessness within.  One is tempted to say that Shooter’s Gardens are a preferable abode.  An inner courtyard, asphalted, swept clean—­looking up to the sky as from a prison.  Acres of these edifices, the tinge of grime declaring the relative dates of their erection; millions of tons of brute brick and mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze.  Barracks, in truth; housing for the army of industrialism, an army fighting with itself, rank against rank, man against man, that the survivors may have whereon to feed.  Pass by in the night, and strain imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender, tumbled together within those forbidding walls.

Clara hated the place from her first hour in it.  It seemed to her that the air was poisoned with the odour of an unclean crowd.  The yells of children at play in the courtyard tortured her nerves; the regular sounds on the staircase, day after day repeated at the same hours, incidents of the life of poverty, irritated her sick brain and filled her with despair to think that as long as she lived she could never hope to rise again above this world to which she was born.  Gone for ever, for ever, the promise that always gleamed before her whilst she had youth and beauty and talent.  With the one, she felt as though she had been robbed of all three blessings; her twenty years were now a meaningless figure; the energies of her mind could avail no more than an idiot’s mummery.  For the author of her calamity she nourished no memory of hatred:  her resentment was against the fate which had cursed her existence from its beginning.