which were
gateways, into outer darkness, which was the streets. On the stalls, as
he could see, were thousands of things, all cheap and most nasty.

What were there? What were not there? Boots and bootlaces, fish and china
ornaments, fruit, old clothes and new clothes, flowers and plants and
lollies, meat and tripe and cheese and butter and bacon! Cheap
music-sheets and cheap jewellery! Stockings and pie-dishes and bottles of
ink! Everything that the common people buy! Anything by which a penny
could be turned by those of small capital and little credit in barter
with those who had less.

One old man's face transfixed him for a moment, clung to his memory
afterwards, the face of an old man, wan and white, greybearded and
hollow-eyed, that was thrust through some hosiery hanging on a rod at the
back of a stall. Nobody was buying there, nobody even looked to buy as
Ned watched for a minute; the stream swept past and the grizzled face
stared on. It had no body, no hands even, it was as if hung there, a
trunkless head. It was the face of a generation grown old, useless and
unloved, which lived by the crumbs that fall from Demos' table and waited
wearily to be gone. It expressed nothing, that was the pain in it. It was
haggard and grizzled and worn out, that was all. It know itself no good
to anybody, know that labouring was a pain and thinking a weariness, and
hope the delusion of fools, and life a vain mockery. It asked none to
buy. It did not move. It only hung there amid the dark draping of its
poor stock and waited.

Would he himself ever be like that, Ned wondered. And yet! And yet!

All around were like this. All! All! All! Everyone in this swarming
multitude of working Sydney. On the faces of all was misery written.
Buyers and sellers and passers-by alike were hateful of life. And if by
chance he saw now and then a fat dame at a stall or a lusty huckster
pushing his wares or a young couple, curious and loving, laughing and
joking as they hustled along arm in arm, he seemed to see on their faces
the dawning lines that in the future would stamp them also with the brand
of despair.

The women, the poor women, they were most wretched of all; the poor
housewives in their pathetic shabbiness, their faces drawn with
child-bearing, their features shrunken with the struggling toil that
never ceases nor stays; the young girls in their sallow youth that was
not youth, with their hollow mirth and their empty faces, and th