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 their sharp
angles or their unnatural busts; the wizened children that served at the
stalls, precocious in infancy, with the wisdom of the Jew and the
impudence of the witless babe; the old crones that crawled along--the