moral conceptions.

They were permitted, and even encouraged to converse with each other,
for the directors very properly judged that anything that conduced to
variations of mood made for pleasing fluctuations in their patterning;
and Elizabeth was almost forced to hear the stories of these lives with
which her own interwove: garbled and distorted they were by vanity
indeed and yet comprehensible enough. And soon she began to appreciate
the small spites and cliques, the little misunderstandings and alliances
that enmeshed about her. One woman was excessively garrulous and
descriptive about a wonderful son of hers; another had cultivated a
foolish coarseness of speech, that she seemed to regard as the wittiest
expression of originality conceivable; a third mused for ever on dress,
and whispered to Elizabeth how she saved her pence day after day, and
would presently have a glorious day of freedom, wearing ... and then
followed hours of description; two others sat always together, and
called one another pet names, until one day some little thing happened,
and they sat apart, blind and deaf as it seemed to one another's being.
And always from them all came an incessant tap, tap, tap, tap, and the
manageress listened always to the rhythm to mark if one fell away. Tap,
tap, tap, tap: so their days passed, so their lives must pass. Elizabeth
sat among them, kindly and quiet, grey-hearted, marvelling at Fate: tap,
tap, tap; tap, tap, tap; tap, tap, tap.

So there came to Denton and Elizabeth a long succession of laborious
days, that hardened their hands, wove strange threads of some new and
sterner substance into the soft prettiness of their lives, and drew
grave lines and shadows on their faces. The bright, convenient ways of
the former life had receded to an inaccessible distance; slowly they
learnt the lesson of the underworld--sombre and laborious, vast and
pregnant. There were many little things happened: things that would be
tedious and miserable to tell, things that were bitter and grievous to
bear--indignities, tyrannies, such as must ever season the bread of the
poor in cities; and one thing that was not little, but seemed like the
utter blackening of life to them, which was that the child they had
given life to sickened and died. But that story, that ancient,
perpetually recurring story, has been told so often, has been told so
beautifully, that there is no need to tell it over again here. There was
the same sharp fe