Humphrey looked along the platform, and he saw Elizabeth Carr bending down and talking to a little girl. She looked tall and beautiful, among all the harsh ugliness for which these children stood. Her figure, as she stooped to the little ones, seemed to shine with grace and merciful pity. She saw Humphrey, and nodded to him, as he raised his hat. Then she came up leading the child.
"Look," she said, and though her eyes were lit with anger, her voice was gentle. "Look at this child's dress—and the father's earning thirty shillings a week."
Humphrey looked. The child was dressed grotesquely, so grotesquely that it appealed more to the sense of the ludicrous than to the sense of pity. Her main garment was an absurd black cape sparkling with sequins, that undoubtedly belonged to her mother's cloak; it reached to below the child's knees. Beneath this was a tattered muslin blouse of an uncertain, faded colour, and beneath that—nothing. Elizabeth lifted the cape a little and showed undergarments made of string sacking. The child had neither shoes nor stockings.
"Isn't it a shame!" she cried, sending the child to join the rest. "Doesn't it revolt you?"
"Poverty!" said Humphrey. "What can one do?"
"Do!" retorted Elizabeth. "What's the good of having compulsory education, if you don't have compulsory clothing. I know the parents of that child. They could dress that child if they wanted to. Oh," and she clenched her fists, "it makes me feel so helpless."
They talked about it on the way to the forest, as they followed in the wake of the children.
"The wicked folly and the shame of it," she said. "Does nobody realize the ruin and wreckage that belongs to big cities? Thousands on thousands of lives ended before they began. The parents don't know, and won't know.
"And what becomes of those who live? These children here will go through their school-days, and then—what? A small percentage of them may get on, the rest will become casual labourers, dock-hands, and loafers."
They passed a long, ill-clad youth lounging along the road. His face was brutally coarse, and he walked with a slouch.