After buying her a large box of candy I hailed a taxi and took my little girl home to her shabby room and left her. She was very gay. She had been made quite a little of since we started from the region of rented rooms. Her purse was now the richer by three pounds. Her opinion had been asked, her advice taken, she had been allowed to order. I had tried to make her feel that I admired her a little and that I was sorry for her a little. At her door, in the rain, I told her I might use some of this experience in a book sometime. She said, “Send me a copy of your book. Will I be in it?” “Yes.” “Send it to me, will you?” “If you’re here.” “Oh, I’ll be here. I don’t move often.” Poor little Welsh waif! I thought, how long, how long, will she be “here” before she goes down before the grim shapes that lurk in her dreary path--disease, despair, death? CHAPTER XIV LONDON; THE EAST END As interesting as any days that I spent in London were two in the East End, though I am sorry to add more drabby details to those just narrated. All my life I had heard of this particular section as grim, doleful, a center and sea of depraved and depressed life. “Nothing like the East End of London,” I have heard people say, and before I left I expected to look over it, of course. My desire to do so was whetted by a conversation I had with the poet, John Masefield, who, if I remember rightly, had once lived in the extreme East End of London, Canningtown. He had talked of the curious physical condition of the people which he described as “bluggy” or stagnant. Little intelligence in the first place, according to him, seemed to be breeding less and less intelligence as time went on. Poverty, lack of wits, lack of ambition were fostering inbreeding. Such things are easy to say. No one can really tell. Even more interesting to me was the proffered information concerning East End amusements--calf-eating contests, canary-singing contests, whiffet races, pigeon-eating contests. I was told it would be hard to indicate how simple-minded the people were in many things and yet how low and dark in their moods, physical and moral. I got a suggestion of this some days later, when I discovered in connection with the police courts that every little while the court-room is cleared in order that terrible, unprintable, almost unbearable testimony may be taken. What he said to me somehow suggested the atmosphere of the Whitechapel murders--those demoniac crimes that had thrilled the world a few years before. I must confess that my first impression was one of disappointment. America is strident and its typical “East Side” and slum conditions are strident also. There is no voiceless degradation that I have ever seen in America. The East Side of New York is unquestionably one of the noisiest spots in the world, if not the worst. It is so full of children--so full of hope too. I was surprised to find how distinctly different are the two realms of poverty in New York and London.