The Workingmans Paradise | Page 9

showed between the tall rows of houses.
There were no clouds visible. Only there was a deepening grey in the
hard blueness above them, and the breathless heat, even at this time of
day, was stifling.
"I don't know that you'd call this a pleasant place," he commented,
adding with the frankness of an old friend: "Why do you live here,
Nellie?"
She shrugged her shoulders. The gesture meant anything and
everything.
"You needn't have bothered sending me that money back," said Ned, in
reply to the shrug.
"It isn't that," explained Nellie. "I've got a pretty good billet. A pound a
week and not much lost time! But I went to room there when I was
pretty hard up. It's a small room and was cheap. Then, after, I took to
boarding there as well. That was pretty cheap and suited me and helped

them. I suppose I might get a better place but they're very kind, and I
come and go as I like, and--" she hesitated. "After all," she went on,
"there's not much left out of a pound."
"I shouldn't think so," remarked Ned, looking at her and thinking that
she was very nicely dressed.
"Oh! You needn't look," laughed Nellie. "I make my own dresses and
trim my own hats. A woman wouldn't think much of the stuff either."
"I want to tell you how obliged I was for that money, Ned," continued
Nellie, an expression of pain on her face. "There was no one else I
could ask, and I needed it so. It was very kind--"
"Ugh! That's nothing," interrupted Ned, hiding his bashfulness under a
burst of boisterousness. "Why, Nellie, I'd like you to be sending to me
regular. It might just as well come to you as go any other way. If you
ever do want a few pounds again, Nellie,"--he added, seriously, "I can
generally manage it. I've got plenty just now--far more than I'll ever
need." This with wild exaggeration. "You might as well have it as not.
I've got nobody."
"Thanks, just the same, Ned! When I do want it I'll ask you. I'm afraid
I'll never have any money to lend you if you need it, but if I ever do
you know where to come."
"It's a bargain, Nellie," said Ned. Then, eager to change the subject,
feeling awkward at discussing money matters because he would have
been so willing to have given his last penny to anybody he felt friends
with, much less to the girl by his side:
"But where are we going?"
"To see Sydney!" said Nellie.
They had turned several times since they started but the neighborhood
remained much the same. The streets, some wider, some narrower, all
told of sordid struggling. The shops were greasy, fusty, grimy. The

groceries exposed in their windows damaged specimens of bankrupt
stocks, discolored tinned goods, grey sugars, mouldy dried fruits; at
their doors, flitches of fat bacon, cut and dusty. The meat with which
the butchers' shops overflowed was not from show-beasts, as Ned could
see, but the cheaper flesh of over-travelled cattle, ancient oxen, ewes
too aged for bearing; all these lean scraggy flabby-fleshed carcasses
surrounded and blackened by buzzing swarms of flies that invaded the
foot-path outside in clouds. The draperies had tickets, proclaiming
unparalleled bargains, on every piece; the whole stock seemed
displayed outside and in the doorway. The fruiterers seemed not to be
succeeding in their rivalry with each other and with the Chinese
hawkers. The Chinese shops were dotted everywhere, dingier than any
other, surviving and succeeding, evidently, by sheer force of cheapness.
The roadways everywhere were hard and bare, reflecting the rays of the
ascending sun until the streets seemed to be Turkish baths, conducted
on a new and gigantic method. There was no green anywhere, only
unlovely rows of houses, now gasping with open doors and windows
for air.
Air! That was what everything clamoured for, the very stones, the dogs,
the shops, the dwellings, the people. If it was like this soon after ten,
what would it be at noon?
Already the smaller children were beginning to weary of play. In
narrow courts they lolled along on the flags, exhausted. In wider streets,
they 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