sat quietly on door-steps or the kerb, or announced their discomfort in
peevish wailings. The elder children quarrelled still and swore from
their playground, the gutter, but they avoided now the sun and
instinctively sought the shade and it is pretty hot when a child minds
the sun. At shop doors, shopmen, sometimes shopwomen, came to wipe their
warm faces and examine the sky with anxious eyes. The day grow hotter and
hotter. Ned could feel the rising heat, as though he were in an oven with
a fire on underneath. Only the Chinese looked cool.

Nellie led the way, sauntering along, without hurrying. Several times she
turned down passages that Ned would hardly have noticed, and brought him
out in courts closed in on all sides, from which every breath of air
seemed purposely excluded. Through open doors and windows he could see
the inside of wretched homes, could catch glimpses of stifling bedrooms
and close, crowded little kitchens. Often one of the denizens came to
door or window to stare at Nellie and him; sometimes they were accosted
with impudent chaff, once or twice with pitiful obscenity.

The first thing that impressed him was the abandonment that thrust itself
upon him in the more crowded of these courts and alley-ways and
back-streets, the despairing abandonment there of the decencies of
living. The thin dwarfed children kicked and tumbled with naked limbs on
the ground; many women leaned half-dressed and much unbuttoned from
ground floor windows, or came out into the passage-ways slatternly. In
one court two unkempt vile-tongued women of the town wrangled and abused
each other to the amusement of the neighborhood, where the working poor
were huddled together with those who live by shame. The children played
close by as heedlessly as if such quarrels were common events, cursing
themselves at each other with nimble filthy tongues.