Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. III, 1889.djvu/83

 little windows multiplied for points of torment to the vision. Nearer again, the markets of Smithfield, Bartholomew’s Hospital, the tract of modern deformity, cleft by a gulf of railway, which spreads between Clerkenwell Koad and Charterhouse Street. Down in Farringdon Street the carts, waggons, vans, cabs, omnibuses, crossed and intermingled in a steaming splash-bath of mud; human beings, reduced to their due paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of pavement, bound on errands which were a mockery, driven automaton-like by forces they neither understood nor could resist.

“Can I go out into a world like that—alone?” was the thought which made Clara’s spirit fail as she stood gazing. “Can I face life as it is for women who grow old in earning bare daily bread among those terrible streets? Year after year to go in and out from some wretched garret that I call home, with my face hidden, my heart stabbed with misery till it is cold and bloodless!”

Then her eye fell upon the spire of St. James’s Church, on Clerkenwell Green, whose bells used to be so familiar to her. The