The girl with a coarse laugh pushed through her companions to the door. It was a strange scene: the large room of the old factory, clean and bright, with a blazing fire; a work-table on which lay piles of bandages and splints; groups of rough, strangely garbed, out-of-elbows women, each with a large curled fringe, under which the tired eyes appealed to one as strangely unnatural, and, in the midst of them, trim, erect, commanding Cynthia. Orders, questions, explanations ringing out. She stood like a disciplined sergeant amongst a throng of raw recruits—and recruits they were, let into the great army of humanity with no safeguards, no training, or only the most elementary, all dreary, purposeless, hacking their way through life. Only now and then into this rank-and-file of the world dipped their more splendid sisters who knew the aim of it all, and could teach them the means of attainment. There, under the flaring gas-jets, in the midst of the strange, teeming life of Stepney, horrible, oppressive, marvellously primitive, naked of the veneer of civilization, two women labored to bring light and help. Cynthia felt strangely uplifted. Her heart was singing the song “The stars sing in their spheres.” She did not feel the hopelessness of it all. After the class was over she was about to lock up the club and go back to Muriel, when the girl who had interrupted the class entered again carrying a bundle in her arms. She placed it very gently on the table. “’Ere’s the little fellar,” she said quietly. Cynthia pulled back the blanket and started with surprise at the picture before her—a baby boy of three years old, his head a mass of black curls, and underneath great blue Irish eyes. His face, flushed with recent sleep, looked up at her. The girl seeing the admiration in her face smiled proudly. “’E’s all I ’ave,” she said. “Mother left ’im to me to see to three years since, for father ’e went off with another woman, and she took it to ’art, mother did, so she died. Think likely ’e’ll git better, miss?” Cynthia lifted the child into her arms. There was no mistaking the cruelly twisted spine. He might live two years, or even three, but it was a bad case—incurable. She looked from the beautiful baby face to the eager, passionate look in the girl’s eyes, who was hungry for an answer. Cynthia felt angry with the hopeless tragedy of it. Possibly Muriel might have known what to say; for herself she raved against the invincible spirit of maternity, at once the torture and compensation for all who love the little ones. “Does he suffer much?” she asked. “’E do cry hawful sometimes, pore little chap. Can you do hanythink, miss?” “Do anything? I daresay I can make him a little easier, but it’s a very bad case.” “Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll never get any better?” “I’m afraid not, Carrie.” “Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll die?” There was an awful intensity in the question.