a bleedin' fool you are! Want to get out o' this 'ere 'ole?
Tike my tip then--gettin' drunk's on'y way out of it."

Farther on I had to steer my way through jostling companies of young
people of both sexes who were going (I thought) the same way as the
woman--girls out of the factories with their free walk, and their
boisterous "fellers" from the breweries.

It was a cold and savage night. As I approached the side street in which
I lived I saw by the light of the arc lamps a small group of people, a
shivering straggle of audience, with the hunched-up shoulders of beings
thinly clad and badly fed, standing in stupid silence at the corner
while two persons wearing blue uniforms (a man in a peaked cap and a
young woman in a poke bonnet) sang a Salvation hymn of which the refrain
was "It is well, it is well with my soul."

The door of the Jew's house was shut (for the first time in my
experience), so I had to knock and wait, and while I waited I could not
help but hear the young woman in the poke bonnet pray.

Her prayer was about "raising the standard of Calvary," and making the
drunkards and harlots of the East End into "seekers" and "soul yielders"
and "prisoners of the King of Kings."

Before the last words of the prayer were finished the man in the peaked
cap tossed up his voice in another hymn, and the young woman joined him
with an accordion:

"_Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod_. . . ."

The door was opened by the Jew himself, who, assuming a severe manner,
said something to me in his guttural voice which I did not hear or heed,
for I pushed past him and walked firmly upstairs.

When I had reached my room and lit the gas, I closed and locked the
door, as if I were preparing to commit a crime--and perhaps I was.

I did not allow myself to think of what I intended to do that night, but
I knew quite well, and when at one moment my conscience pressed me hard
something cried out in my heart:

"Who can blame me since my child's life is in danger?"

I opened my trunk and took out my clothes--all that remained of the
dresses I had brought from Ellan. They were few, and more than a little
out of fashion, but one of them, though far from gay, was bright and
stylish--a light blue frock with a high collar and some white lace over
the bosom.

I remember wondering why I had not thought of pawning it during the
week, when I had had so much need of money, and then being glad tha