Round about a pound a week / by Mrs. Pember Reeves.

  • Magdalene Stuart Reeves
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Round about a pound a week / by Mrs. Pember Reeves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    behind window curtains, knowing perfectly that every incoming and outgoing of their own is also jealously recorded by critical eyes up and down the street. A sympathetic stranger walking the length of one of these thoroughfares feels the atmosphere of criticism. The rent-collector, the insurance agent, the coal-man, may pass the time of day with worn women in the doorways, but a friendly smile from the stranger receives no response. A weekly caller becomes the abashed object of intense interest on the part of everybody in the street, from the curious glances of the green- grocer’s lady at the corner to the appraising stare of the fat little baker who always manages to be on his doorstep across the road. And everywhere along the street is the visitor conscious of eyes which disappear from behind veiled windows. This consciousness accentuates the dispiriting outlook. The houses are outwardly decent—two stories of grimy brick. The roadway is narrow, but on the whole well kept, and on the pavement outside many doors there is to be noticed, in a greater or less condition of freshness, a semicircle of hearth- stone, which has for its radius the length of the housewife’s arm as she kneels on the step. In some streets little paved alley-ways lead behind the front row of houses, and twist and turn among still smaller dwellings at the back—dwellings where the front door leads downwards into a room instead of upwards into a passage. Dis-
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