he 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.

For this she had dared everything, had made the supreme sacrifice.
Conscience had nothing to say to her, but she felt herself an outcast
even among these wretched toilers whose swarming aroused her disgust.
Given the success which had been all but in her grasp, and triumphant
pride would have scored out every misgiving as to the cost at which the
victory had been won. Her pride was unbroken; under the stress of
anguish it became a scorn for goodness and humility; but in the
desolation of he