Page:Our Girls.pdf/48

 think of the witches in Macbeth, especially when the hair of one of the workers falls from its knot, and, in lifting her ladle, her gaunt figure sways across the light. A closer view brings tenderer feelings, for the elderly woman has a face such as Rembrandt loved to paint, seamed and scored with years of toil, and telling of children brought into the world in labour and sorrow, and then buried, perhaps, in infancy. You find that the poor old thing has lost her son in the war, that he was her breadwinner, and therefore she has had to begin again to work. It is perhaps the cruellest part of the ancient human tragedy she is living through, but there is a dark fire in her old heart still.

"Yes, I'm cooking some pudding," she says, "for them as killed my Joe."

Our next call is at a filling factory, which has points of difference from the danger zone already described. It occupies a broad expanse of waste ground that used to be employed, long ago, I think, as a pleasure resort. Over the