ng a meal
of bread [one thick slice each, with margarine and golden syrup]
and diluted milk.

The man, a workman out of employment, is young, agile, a talker,
a poser, sharp enough to be capable of anything in reason except
honesty or altruistic considerations of any kind. The woman is a
commonplace old bundle of poverty and hard-worn humanity. She
looks sixty and probably is forty-five. If they were rich people,
gloved and muffed and well wrapped up in furs and overcoats, they
would be numbed and miserable; for it is a grindingly cold, raw,
January day; and a glance at the background of grimy warehouses
and leaden sky visible over the whitewashed walls of the yard
would drive any idle rich person straight to the Mediterranean.
But these two, being no more troubled with visions of the
Mediterranean than of the moon, and being compelled to keep more
of their clothes in the pawnshop, and less on their persons, in
winter than in summer, are not depressed by the cold: rather are
they stung into vivacity, to which their meal has just now given
an almost jolly turn. The man takes a pull at his mug, and then
gets up and moves about the yard with his hands deep in his
pockets, occasionally breaking into a stepdance.

THE WOMAN. Feel better otter your meal, sir?

THE MAN. No. Call that a meal! Good enough for you, props; but
wot is it to me, an intelligent workin man.

THE WOMAN. Workin man! Wot are you?

THE MAN. Painter.

THE WOMAN [sceptically] Yus, I dessay.

THE MAN. Yus, you dessay! I know. Every loafer that can't do
nothink calls isself a painter. Well, I'm a real painter:
grainer, finisher, thirty-eight bob a week when I can get it.

THE WOMAN. Then why don't you go and get it?

THE MAN. I'll tell you why. Fust: I'm intelligent--fffff! it's
rotten cold here [he dances a step or two]--yes: intelligent
beyond the station o life into which it has pleased the
capitalists to call me; and they don't like a man that sees
through em. Second, an intelligent bein needs a doo share of
appiness; so I drink somethink cruel when I get the chawnce.
Third, I stand by my class and do as little as I can so's to
leave arf the job for me fellow workers. Fourth, I'm fly enough
to know wots inside the law and wots outside it; and inside it I
do as the capitalists do: pinch wot I can lay me ands on. In a
proper state of society I am sober, industrious and honest: in
Rome, so to speak, I do as the Romans do. Wots the consequence?