Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/75

 smells surrounded him. From his clothes came a heavy reek of artificial manure. His breath exhaled the fumes of whiskey. His body charged the air with an odour of stale sweat. He once boasted—a misguided reformer had proposed the erection of a bathroom in the County Infirmary—that he had not wetted his skin for seven-and-twenty years. His pipe, which he puffed as he worked, added the fourth smell. Even a violent anti-tobacconist would have been grateful, under the circumstances, to inhale the smoke of Mr. Sweeney's pipe.

There was a tap at the door, and a sluttish girl shambled into the room.

"Please sir, the doctor's within in the shop, and says you sent for him."

It would have been difficult to guess the girl's age by looking at her. She had the face of a careworn, middle-aged woman, and the figure of an undeveloped child. Her cheeks were pallid and puffy; the rest of her body was painfully thin. Her eyes were full of watchful terror and dull cunning, like the terror and the cunning of an animal which has often been hunted and expects in the end to be killed. She was fifteen years old. At that age girls ought to want to sing and dance, to be full of joyous confidence in life. This girl shambled, cowered, and lied. She was Mrs. Flanagan's eldest daughter, and she was Mr. Sweeny's servant. She had been made over into a worse than negro slavery