tin eyed her.

"Don't funk!"

"I'm not funking, Martin, only I can't stand the smells."

"You'll have to get used to them."

"Yes, I know; but--but I forgot my eucalyptus."

The young man took out a handkerchief which had not yet been unfolded.

"Here, take mine."

"They do make me feel so--it's a shame to take yours," and she took the
handkerchief.

"That's all right," said Martin. "Come on!"

The houses of this narrow street, inside and out, seemed full of women.
Many of them had babies in their arms; they were working or looking out
of windows or gossiping on doorsteps. And all stopped to stare as the
young couple passed. Thyme stole a look at her companion. His long
stride had not varied; there was the usual pale, observant, sarcastic
expression on his face. Clenching the handkerchief in readiness, and
trying to imitate his callous air, she looked at a group of five women on
the nearest doorstep.

Three were seated and two were standing. One of these, a young woman
with a round, open face, was clearly very soon to have a child; the
other, with a short, dark face and iron-grey, straggling hair, was
smoking a clay pipe. Of the three seated, one, quite young, had a face
as grey white as a dirty sheet, and a blackened eye; the second, with her
ragged dress disarranged, was nursing a baby; the third, in the centre,
on the top step, with red arms akimbo, her face scored with drink, was
shouting friendly obscenities to a neighbour in the window opposite. In
Thyme's heart rose the passionate feeling, 'How disgusting! how
disgusting!' and since she did not dare to give expression to it, she bit
her lips and turned her head from them, resenting, with all a young
girl's horror, that her sex had given her away. The women stared at her,
and in those faces, according to their different temperaments, could be
seen first the same vague, hard interest that had been Thyme's when she
first looked at them, then the same secret hostility and criticism, as
though they too felt that by this young girl's untouched modesty, by her
gushed cheeks and unsoiled clothes, their sex had given them away. With
contemptuous movements of their lips and bodies, on that doorstep they
proclaimed their emphatic belief in the virtue and reality of their own
existences and in the vice and unreality of her intruding presence.

"Give the doll to Bill; 'e'd make 'er work for once, the---" In a burst
of laughter the epithet was lost.