"I am thankful to say that is a condition of which I have no personal knowledge."
"You have cause to be thankful. Well, I have, and so has Sydney Beaton. If it hadn't been for me he'd have been dead long ago, with cold, misery and hunger."
"Is that true?"
"If you doubt it, you can. Say you don't believe me. Well--don't. I taught him one way of keeping himself alive and of putting money in his pocket, and he managed to do both. But it was a way he never liked; there were times when, I believe, that after all he would have rather starved."
"So I should imagine."
"Oh, you can imagine a great deal, I shouldn't wonder, but do you think you've imagination enough to enable you to put yourself in the place of the woman who was peddling matches at the corner of the street as we came along, with odd boots on--such boots!--and no stockings, and probably little more on than a skirt which it would make you uncomfortable to think of touching even with your finger-tips? You say you never could be in the position of such a woman--but he was."
One could see that, in spite of herself, Miss Forster shivered.
"Is that absolutely a fact?"
"The second time I met him he was carrying a sandwich-board in the Strand--now it's out--in that cold weather we had last January; and he hadn't three-penn'orth of clothing on him--three-pennyworth! Why, a rag-man would have wanted to be paid for carrying away what he had on. He was perished with the cold; he was nothing but skin and bone; misery and hunger had made him half-witted. In that weather he had slept out of doors every night--in the streets. He hadn't had six-pennyworth of food in a week. You stand there, well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed, and you think yourself a paragon of all the virtues, entitled to look down on such as I am, on what he became. You've not yourself to thank for being what you are. If you were to be stripped naked, and put into the woman's rags who was peddling matches, and had to live her life, for only a month, what kind of a fine lady, with pretty sentiments, do you think you'd be by then?"
Miss Spurrier had become suddenly so much in earnest that there was no doubt about her having succeeded in interesting Violet Forster at last. A light seemed to have come into her face, and a glow into her eyes.