'Exactly. Either you go on and are a cripple for life or you stop and starve. Yours is a disease of occupation, purely a natural consequence of your work. Perfectly normal, perfectly. It is undesirable to encourage laziness; there are girls starving to-day for lack of work, but it would never do to reduce your hours to eight. It would interfere with the P. R. R. dividends.'
Victoria looked at him without feeling.
'What am I to do?' she asked at length.
'Go to a hospital,' said Farwell. 'These institutions are run by the wealthy who pay two guineas a year ransom for a thousand pounds of profits and get in the bargain a fine sense of civic duty done. No doubt the directors of the P.R.R. contribute most generously.'
'I can't give up my job,' said Victoria dully.
'Perhaps they'll give you a stocking,' said Farwell, 'or sell it you, letting you pay in instalments so that you be not pauperised. This is called training in responsibility, also self-help.'
Victoria got up. She could bear it no longer. Farwell saw her home and made her promise to apply for leave to see the doctor. As the door closed behind her he stood still for some minutes on the doorstep, filling his pipe.
'Well, well,' he said at length, 'the Government might think of that lethal chamber—but no, that would never do, it would deplete the labour market and hamper the commercial development of the Empire.'
He walked away, a crackling little laugh floating behind him. The faint light of a lamp fell on his bowed head and shoulders, making him look like a Titan born a dwarf.
Two days later Victoria went to the Carew. She had never before set foot in a hospital. Such intercourse as she had had with doctors was figured by discreet interviews in dark studies filled with unspeakably ugly and reassuringly solid furniture. Those doctors had patted her hand, said she needed a little change or may be a tonic. At the Carew, fed as it is by the misery of two square miles of North East London, the revelation of pain was dazzling, apocalyptic. The sight of the benches crowded with women and children—some pale as corpses, others flushed with fever, some with faces bandaged or disfigured by sores—almost made her sick. They were packed in serried rows; the children almost all cried persistently, except here and there a baby, who looked with frightful fixity at the glazed roof. From all this chattering crowd of the condemned rose a stench of iodoform, perspiration, unwashed bodies, the acrid smell of poverty.