Perhaps she had a romantic idea--and there is romance even in Budge
Street-that Button would support her. He very soon shattered any
such illusion by appropriating the remainder of her fortune and
kicking her into the factory with hobnailed boots. It would be wrong
to say that Mrs. Button did not complain; she did. She tent the air
of Budge Street with horrible execration; but she went to the
factory, where, save for the intervals of retirement rendered
necessary by the births of the little Buttons, she was contented
enough to stay.

If Paul Kegworthy had been of the same fibre as the little Buttons,
he would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history
would never have been written. He would have grown up to man's
estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit
in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the
day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of
clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather
in clotted greyness on the football ground. He might have been sober
and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed
of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment,
and the world outside Bludston would never have heard of him. Paul,
however, differed greatly from the little Buttons. They, children of
the grey cap and the red shawl, resembled hundreds of thousands of
little human rabbits similarly parented. Only the trained eye could
have identified them among a score or two of their congeners. For
the most part, they were dingily fair, with snub noses, coarse
mouths, and eyes of an indeterminate blue. Of that type, once
blowsily good-looking, was Mrs. Button herself. But Paul wandered a
changeling about the Bludston streets. In the rows of urchins in the
crowded Board School classroom he sat as conspicuous as any little