ng on doorsteps. And all stopped to stare as the
young couple passed. Thyme stole a look at her companion. His long
stride had not varied; there was the usual pale, observant, sarcastic
expression on his face. Clenching the handkerchief in readiness, and
trying to imitate his callous air, she looked at a group of five women
on the nearest doorstep.

Three were seated and two were standing. One of these, a young woman
with a round, open face, was clearly very soon to have a child; the
other, with a short, dark face and iron-grey, straggling hair, was
smoking a clay pipe. Of the three seated, one, quite young, had a face
as grey white as a dirty sheet, and a blackened eye; the second, with
her ragged dress disarranged, was nursing a baby; the third, in the
centre, on the top step, with red arms akimbo, her face scored with
drink, was shouting friendly obscenities to a neighbour in the window
opposite. In Thyme's heart rose the passionate feeling, 'How disgusting!
how disgusting!' and since she did not dare to give expression to it,
she bit her lips and turned her head from them, resenting, with all a
young girl's horror, that her sex had given her away. The women stared
at her, and in those faces, according to their different temperaments,
could be seen first the same vague, hard interest that had been Thyme's
when she first looked at them, then the same secret hostility and
criticism, as though they too felt that by this young girl's untouched
modesty, by her gushed cheeks and unsoiled clothes, their sex had given
them away. With contemptuous movements of their lips and bodies, on that
doorstep they proclaimed their emphatic belief in the virtue and reality
of their own existences and in the vice and unreality of her intruding
presence.

"Give the doll to Bill; 'e'd make 'er work for once, the---" In a burst
of laughter the epithet was lost.

Martin's lips curled.

"Purple just here," he said.

Thyme's cheeks were crimson.

At the end of the little street he stopped before a shop.

"Come on," he said, "you'll see the sort of place where they buy their
grub."

In the doorway were standing a thin brown spaniel, a small fair woman
with a high, bald forehead, from which the hair was gleaned into
curlpapers, and a little girl with some affection of the skin.

Nodding coolly, Martin motioned them aside. The shop was ten feet
square; its counters, running parallel to two of the walls, were covered
with plates of cak