“I have only just come here,” said the girl.
“Admirin’ the view!” remarked Meg with a wheezy laugh as she took her place beside the girl at the window. “A fine sight to look at, that. Dirty washin’ hung out to dry; dirty houses; everything dirty. Look down at the yard!”
A four-square block of buildings with outhouses, slaty grey and ugly, scabbed on to the walls, enclosed a paved courtyard, at one corner of which stood a pump, at another a stable with a heap of manure piled high outside the door. Two grey long-bodied rats could be seen running across from the pump to the stable, a ragged tramp who had slept all night on the warm dunghill shuffled up to his feet, rubbed the sleep and dirt from his eyes, then slunk away from the place as if conscious of having done something very wrong.
“That man has slept here for many a night,” said Meg; then pointing her finger upwards over the roofs of many houses to a spire that pierced high through the smoke-laden air, she said: “That’s the Municipal Buildin’s; that’s where the rich people meet and talk about the best thing to be done with houses like these. It’s easy to talk over yonder; that house cost five hunner and fifty thousand pounds to build. A gey guid hoose, surely, isn’t it, Sheila Carrol?”
“It’s comin’ half-past five, Meg, and it’s time ye were settin’ out for yer work,” was Sheila’s answer. “Ye’d spend half yer life bletherin’.”
“A good, kindly and decent woman she is,” Sheila told Norah when Meg took her departure. “Works very hard and, God forgive her! drinks very hard too. Nearly every penny that doesn’t go in rent does in the crathur, and she’s happy enough in her own way although a black Prodesan.... Ah! there’s some quare people here on this stair when ye come to know them all!”
Over a tin of tea and a crust Sheila made plans for the future. “I can earn about one and three a day at the finishin’,” she said. “I have to buy my own thread out of that, three bobbins a week at twopence ha’penny a bobbin.
“Ye used to be a fine knitter, Norah,” Sheila continued. “D’ye mind the night long ago on Dooey Strand? God knows it was hardships enough for the strong women like us to sleep out in the snow, not to mention a young girsha like yerself. But ye were the great knitter then and ye’ll be nimble with yer fingers yet, I’ll go bail. Sewing ye might be able to take a turn at.”
“I used to be good with needle, Sheila,” said the girl.
“Then that’ll be what we’ll do. We’ll work together, me and yerself, and we’ll get on together well and cheaper. It’ll be only the one fire and the one light; and now, if ye don’t mind, we’ll begin work and I’ll show ye what’s to be done.”