dge Street; it was only Paul who underwent organized
chastisement. The little Buttons often did wrong; but in the mother's
eyes Paul could never do right. In an animal way she was fond of the
children of Button, and in a way equally animal she bore a venomous
dislike to the child of Keg-worthy. Who and what Kegworthy had been
neither Paul nor any inhabitant of Bludston knew. Once the boy
inquired, and she broke a worn frying-pan over his head. Kegworthy,
whoever he might have been, was wrapt in mystery. She had appeared in
the town when Paul was a year old, giving herself out as a widow. That
she was by no means destitute was obvious from the fact that she at
once rented the house in Budge Street, took in lodgers, and lived at
her ease. Button, who was one of the lodgers, cast upon her the eyes of
desire and married her. Why she married Button she could never
determine. Perhaps she had a romantic idea--and there is romance even
in Budge Street-that Button would support her. He very soon shattered
any such illusion by appropriating the remainder of her fortune and
kicking her into the factory with hobnailed boots. It would be wrong to
say that Mrs. Button did not complain; she did. She tent the air of
Budge Street with horrible execration; but she went to the factory,
where, save for the intervals of retirement rendered necessary by the
births of the little Buttons, she was contented enough to stay.

If Paul Kegworthy had been of the same fibre as the little Buttons, he
would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history would
never have been written. He would have grown up to man's estate in the
factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab mass
of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the
streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking
tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the
football ground. He might have been sober and industrious-the
proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttons-but he
would have taken the colour of his environment, and the world outside
Bludston would never have heard of him. Paul, however, differed greatly
from the little Buttons. They, children of the grey cap and the red
shawl, resembled hundreds of thousands of little human rabbits
similarly parented. Only the trained eye could have identified them
among a score or two of their congeners. For the most part, they were
dingily fai