Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. I, 1889.djvu/237

 As he gazed at her, the haggardness of her countenance smote like a sword-edge through all the black humours about his heart, piercing the very core of love and pity. He spoke in a voice of passionate appeal.

“Clara, come home before it is too late! Come with me—now—come at once! Thank heaven you have got out of that place! Come home, and stay there quietly till we can find you something better.”

“I’ll die rather than go home!” was her answer, flung at him as if in hatred, “Tell my father that, and tell him anything else you like. I want no one to take any thought for me; and I wouldn’t do as you wish, not to save my soul!”

How often, in passing along the streets, one catches a few phrases of discord such as this! The poor can seldom command privacy; their scenes alike of tenderness and of anger must for the most part be enacted on the peopled ways. It is one of their misfortunes, one of the many necessities which blunt feeling, which balk reconciliation,