Two women squatted on the floor, sewing rapidly, with machine-like steadiness. A third suckled as well as her poor means allowed a feeble baby. The mother stared before her with eyes which were very tired. Unlighted--as grey stones in a hollow face--they gazed at a present and a future, too dreary for dreams. All her life was a stain and a grief. One of the women, her companion, was racked with a consumptive cough.
There was by the inside wall of the room, a pile of half-completed clothing--raw material for sweated needles to work upon--and very little else. There were a frameless looking-glass; a few bottles; a battered beer-pot, stolen from the haunt of liquid happiness at the entrance to the Court; one chair, which served as table, cradle and cupboard, when there was something to hoard underneath it; a verminous straw mattress; and some broken wood, cardboard, and rags--the gleanings of rubbish boxes. That is a complete inventory of the furniture, the ornamental as well as the useful.
On the window-ledge were broken crusts, as stale as the phrases of charity, and a black-handled fork, with pieces of string, cotton, needles, several empty reels, which would make firewood some day, and cards of buttons, the capital and essentials of those women's industry.
June, fresh from the revels of Fairyland, was appalled at her picture, and as near to tears as an indignant fairy could be. She felt hot anger against Oberon.
Then again she gazed at Sally Wilkins and studied the hapless child. The fairy's whole being was eager sympathy and love. June knew Sally's history at once through the influence of her powers and the crown.
That was a child who had never seen a green field, or heard any wild birds singing; though very well she knew, as every town-child must do, the twittering of the pert sparrows in the streets. Sally was a lump of solid ignorance. She had heard of God because His name was some necessary part of several favourite swear-phrases; but of the fairies and other sweet realities she had heard just nothing. She lived--poor lass!--in so narrow and limited a world that she might as well have been born in a grave as to the child's destiny in Paradise Court.
She sewed and she sewed, with hardly a pause--"seam and gusset and band"--though in her case it was buttons and buttons and buttons. So constantly was she threading her way through the dark material that life was to her nothing more than a dreary pilgrimage into and out of eternal button-holes. Her fingers were the all-important machines. Her brain was dulled: her soul unquickened. She was twelve years old; and composed of skin, bones, hunger and weariness, wrapped in a modicum of Nothing.
June could not endure the sight any more. Her wings quivered with indignation. She touched the window, flew into the room, and alighted on Sally's shoulder.
The child, without her fingers resting from work for the least part of an instant--time means life to the working poor--looked up wondering. Why did she seem suddenly lighter? Was there sunshine in the room? No, everything appeared precisely as before: though--yes, somebody had certainly, through an obvious misunderstanding, been cleaning the window.
June took off the fairy crown and perched it on Sally's tangle of hair. The consequence was amazing.