"'Ope? Don't you know _that_ neither?"
Then I caught her meaning, and answered faintly:
"Yes."
She looked searchingly into my eyes and said:
"I b'lieve you. Some gels is. S'elp me Gawd I don't know how they done
it, though."
I was shuddering and trembling, for I was catching glimpses, as if by
broken lights from hell, of the life behind--the wrecked hope, the
shattered faith, the human being hunted like a beast and at last turned
into one.
Just at that moment baby awoke and cried again. The woman looked at her
with the same look as before--not so much a smile as a sort of haggard
radiance.
Then leaning over me she blew puffs of alcoholic breath into baby's
face, and stretching out a coarse fat finger she tickled her under the
chin.
Baby ceased to cry and began to smile. Seeing this the woman's eyes
sparkled like sunshine.
"See that," she cried. "S'elp me Jesus, I b'lieve I could 'ave been good
meself if I'd on'y 'ad somethink like this to keer for."
I am not ashamed to say that more than once there had been tears in my
eyes while the woman spoke, though her blasphemies had corrupted the air
like the gases that rise from a dust-heap. But when she touched my child
I shuddered as if something out of the 'lowest depths had tainted her.
Then a strange thing happened.
I had risen to go, although my limbs could scarcely support me, and was
folding my little angel closely in my arms, when the woman rose too and
said:
"You wouldn't let me carry your kiddie a bit, would you?"
I tried to excuse myself, saying something, I know not what The woman
looked at me again, and after a moment she said:
"S'pose not. On'y I thought it might make me think as 'ow I was carryin'
Billie."
That swept down everything.
The one remaining window of the woman's soul was open and I dared not
close it.
I looked down at my child--so pure, so sweet, so stainless; I looked up
at the woman--so foul, so gross, so degraded.
There was a moment of awful struggle and then . . . the woman and I were
walking side by side.
And the harlot was carrying my baby down the street.