small, her hands white and slender, she spoke correctly with a nasal voice, and her teeth (as is not often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem suddenly revealed when they open their mouths) were sound and clean.
The man's smooth face was all commonness and vulgarity.
"He's had appendicitis," Mrs. Wood explained when we were alone. "He's been out of work a long time. As soon as he goes to his job his side bursts out again where they operated on him. He ain't a bit strong."
"When are they going to be married?" I asked.
"Oh, dear me, they don't think of that yet; they're in no hurry."
"Will Miss Ida work after she's married?"
"No, indeed."
Did they not have their share of ideal then, these two young labourers who could wait indefinitely, fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable surroundings?
I returned to my tenement room; its one window opened over a narrow alley flanked on its opposite side by a second tenement, through whose shutters I could look and see repeated layers of squalid lodgings. The thermometer had climbed up into the eighties. The wail of a newly born baby came from the room under mine. The heat was stifling. Outdoors in the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the curb, on the sidewalk, on
the house steps. The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards. Shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of old age and of infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became the anonymous murmur of a hot, human multitude.