Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. II, 1889.djvu/27



the by-ways of Clerkenwell you might, with some difficulty, have discovered an establishment known in its neighbourhood as “Whitehead’s.” It was an artificial-flower factory, and the rooms of which it consisted were only to be reached by traversing a timber-yard and then mounting a wooden staircase outside a saw-mill. Here at busy seasons worked some threescore women and girls, who, owing to the nature of their occupation, were spoken of by the jocose youth of the locality as “Whitehead’s pastepots.”

Naturally they varied much in age and aspect. There was the child who had newly left school and was now invited to consider the question of how to keep herself alive; there was the woman of uncertain age, who