oung people were absolutely penniless, and
only one way lay open. They must go to the Labour Company. So soon as
the rent was a week overdue their few remaining possessions were seized,
and with scant courtesy they were shown the way out of the hotel.
Elizabeth walked along the passage towards the staircase that ascended
to the motionless middle way, too dulled by misery to think. Denton
stopped behind to finish a stinging and unsatisfactory argument with the
hotel porter, and then came hurrying after her, flushed and hot. He
slackened his pace as he overtook her, and together they ascended to the
middle way in silence. There they found two seats vacant and sat down.

"We need not go there--_yet_?" said Elizabeth.

"No--not till we are hungry," said Denton.

They said no more.

Elizabeth's eyes sought a resting-place and found none. To the right
roared the eastward ways, to the left the ways in the opposite
direction, swarming with people. Backwards and forwards along a cable
overhead rushed a string of gesticulating men, dressed like clowns, each
marked on back and chest with one gigantic letter, so that altogether
they spelt out:

"PURKINJE'S DIGESTIVE PILLS."

An anaemic little woman in horrible coarse blue canvas pointed a little
girl to one of this string of hurrying advertisements.

"Look!" said the anaemic woman: "there's yer father."

"Which?" said the little girl.

"'Im wiv his nose coloured red," said the anaemic woman.

The little girl began to cry, and Elizabeth could have cried too.

"Ain't 'e kickin' 'is legs!--_just!_" said the anaemic woman in blue,
trying to make things bright again. "Looky--_now!_"

On the _facade_ to the right a huge intensely bright disc of weird
colour span incessantly, and letters of fire that came and went spelt
out--

"DOES THIS MAKE YOU GIDDY?"

Then a pause, followed by

"TAKE A PURKINJE'S DIGESTIVE PILL."

A vast and desolating braying began. "If you love Swagger Literature,
put your telephone on to Bruggles, the Greatest Author of all Time. The
Greatest Thinker of all Time. Teaches you Morals up to your Scalp! The
very image of Socrates, except the back of his head, which is like
Shakspeare. He has six toes, dresses in red, and never cleans his teeth.
Hear HIM!"

Denton's voice became audible in a gap in the uproar. "I never ought to
have married you," he was saying. "I have wasted your money, ruined you,
brought you to misery. I am a scoundr