Such multitudes of people, often badly dressed and generally with set and anxious faces, hasting to and fro, hustling, elbowing, jostling each other along, as if driven by some invisible power that was swinging an unseen scourge.
No gracious courtesy here! A woman with a child in her arms was no longer a queen. Children were cheap, and sometimes it was as much as I could do to save myself from being pushed off the pavement.
The air seemed to smell of nothing but ale and coarse tobacco. And then the noise! The ceaseless clatter of carts, the clang of electric cars, the piercing shrieks of the Underground Railway coming at intervals out of the bowels of the earth like explosions out of a volcano, and, above all, the raucous, rasping, high-pitched voices of the people, often foul-mouthed, sometimes profane, too frequently obscene.
A cold, grey, joyless, outcast city, cut off from the rest of London by an invisible barrier more formidable than a wall; a city in which the inhabitants seemed to live cold, grey, joyless lives, all the same that they joked and laughed; a city under perpetual siege, the siege of Poverty, in the constant throes of civil war, the War of Want, the daily and hourly fight for food.
If there were other parts of the East End (and I am sure there must be) where people live simple, natural, human lives, I did not see them that day, for my course was down the principal thoroughfares only.
Those thoroughfares, telescoping each other, one after another, seemed as if they would never come to an end.
How tired I was! Even baby was no longer light, and the parcel on my wrist had become as heavy as lead.
Towards four o'clock I came to a broad parapet which had strips of garden enclosed by railings and iron seats in front of them. Utterly exhausted, my arms aching and my legs limp, I sank into one of these seats, feeling that I could walk no farther.
But after a while I felt better, and then I became aware that another woman was sitting beside me.
When I looked at her first I thought I had never in my life seen anything so repulsive. She was asleep, and having that expressionless look which sleep gives, I found it impossible to know whether she was young or old. She was not merely coarse, she was gross. The womanhood in her seemed to be effaced, and I thought she was utterly brutalised and degraded.