“Won’t you help a poor woman to a crust of bread, kind lidy?” said a voluble whining voice at our ears, and a sturdy mendicant thrust her hand between us. She was a very frouzy and forbidding-looking mendicant, indeed, with battered bonnet askew and villainous small eyes, and her neighborhood was redolent of gin.
“Spare a copper, kind lidy and gentleman,” she entreated, with a bibulous smirk, “and call down the blessings of ’eving on a widowed ’art as ’an’t tysted bit or sup since yesterday come to-morrer, and five blessed children wantin’ a ’ome, which it’s the rent overdue and these ’ands wore to knife powder scrapin’ in the gutters for scraps which one crust of bread would ease. Kind lidy, oh, just a copper.”
Dolly was for putting a charitable hand into her pocket as the creature followed us, but I peremptorily stopped her and would not have her imposed upon.
“Kind lidy,” continued the woman, “I’ve walked the streets all night since yesterday morning and the soles off my feet, kind lidy; won’t you spare a copper? And I dursn’t go ’ome for fear of my man, and I buried the youngest a week come yesterday, and praise ’eving I’m a lonely widder, without child or ’usband, kind lidy; just a copper for the funeral—and rot the faces off of you for a couple of bloomin’ marks in your silks and satings and may you die of the black thirst with the ale foamin’ in barrils out of reach. You a lidy? Oh, yes, sich as cocks her nose at a honest woman starvin’ in her rags, and so will you some day, for all your pink cheeks, when you’ve been thrown over like this here bloomin’ bonnet!”
She screamed after us and caught the moldy relic from her head and slapped it upon the pavement in a drunken frenzy, and she reviled us in worse language than I can venture to record. Poor Dolly was frightened and urged me tremblingly to hurry on out of reach of that strident, cursing voice. I was so angry that I would have liked to give the foul-mouthed harridan into custody, but the nervous tremors of my companion urged me to the wiser course of leaving bad alone, and we were soon out of earshot of the degraded creature.
“Renny,” whispered the girl in half-terrified tones, “did you hear what she said?”
“What does it matter what she said, Dolly?”
“She cursed me. God wouldn’t allow a curse from a woman like that to mean anything, would He?”
“My dear, you must cure yourself of those fancies. God, you may be sure, wouldn’t use such a discordant instrument for His divine thunders. The market value of her curse, you see, she put at a copper.”
She looked up at me with her lips quivering a little. She was evidently upset, and it was some time before I could win her back to her own pretty self.