"I'll dance for a ha'penny! I'll dance for a ha'penny!" she whined.
"Go on! dance, old lady," said one of the men who was carrying an empty drawer, which had just been scrubbed, to dry in the sunshine of the yard. He set it down, end upwards, and stood expectantly. The two other men paused also.
"Go on! Aren't you going to begin?" said one of them.
"She's a funny old thing, this one," said the Matron to Anne, stopping to watch, as the old woman, holding her skirts to her knees, her clogs clacking, and with a smile of imbecility fixed on her face, began to hop from one thin leg to the other, stamping slowly round on her heels in the artless manner of a child. All at once she stopped, and, pulling up her apron, put a corner of it in her mouth, hanging her head and giggling.
"They're all looking at me, all them men," she giggled. "Fancy me dancing with all them men looking." One of the men broke into a laugh, which was changed immediately into an attack of asthma.
"Dance again, old lady!" called a younger man, with the effects of hard drinking visible in his face.
The shrunken and pitiful figure revolved several times, stamping on her heels, then stopped with the same grotesque coquetry.
"She's a funny old thing, isn't she?" said the Matron to Anne. "She gives us many a laugh."
"It's too humbling to look at. I cannot laugh," said Anne. "Poor old thing, to have come to that."
"She doesn't know, you know," said the Matron. "You're wasting your pity. They're most of them better off in the infirmary here than they were outside. You've no idea what a dirty state she was found in for one."