She shook her head.
'Any dinner?'
'No.'
'Nor any breakfast neither, I'll back. I suppose you're hard up; that's enough to make anyone go anywhere but into that,' with a backward jerk of his thumb towards what seemed to be his pet aversion. He was a man whose occupation caused him to pass a good deal of his time on bridges, and he knew the river and the smells thereof.
'No,' said Alice, 'I'm not very hard up, and I'm in work, too; but I moved into a new place to-day, and I felt too lonely to bother about dinner or anything, and I expect going without made me a bit wild and soft like.'
'Have some of this,' was his answer, and soon Alice began to feel a returning sense of physical comfort steal through her, as she sat resting by the cheering fire, drinking the hot coffee from a tin mug, with a slice of bread and cheese on her knee, while her companion kept up a constant ripple of somewhat inconsequent talk, which was his notion of 'making conversation' for his guest. She took her part in the dialogue with an ease which surprised herself. It seems very strange that people should not be more affected than they generally are by having been face to face with death. The fact is, that it is so impossible to realise subjectively what death is, that people feel less awestruck at having been so near it than they do at having been within an ace of having their leg broken, or of being marked with small-pox. Perhaps this is why so many men sleep sound sleeps and eat hearty breakfasts just before execution.
It was a long time since anyone had thought it worth while to talk so much to Alice, and she felt so interested, and withal so comfortable, that it never occurred to her that this interlude of warmth and companionship must soon be over, and that then she would have to face the desolate streets and that cheerless room. Of seeking again the chill refuge from which her new acquaintance had saved her she certainly never thought. That madness was over.
Her black-bearded preserver was in the midst of an economic dissertation of a somewhat confused character on the reasons of hard times and bad wages, when a black shadow falling on a moonlit slab of stone close by them made them both look up.
'Why, if it isn't Mr Peter Hitch,' said the pavior. 'So you're out again, sir? Chilly night, ain't it? Come and have a warm. This young woman's had a warm, and she feels better for it, I'll be bound.'
The new-comer sat down on some boards near the fire with a graceful salutation towards Alice.