As a passer-by, I had known that spot in a busy street all my life; or rather, I thought I knew it. It was only when I took my courage in both hands and a money-box in one of them, and went to stand there every day for a week, that I discovered how wide a gulf it is that separates the passer-by from those who are passed by. It was all right as long as the sun shone and sent charming side-lights across the bunches of colour in the flower-lady's basket, and put gay and human feelings into the heart of the public so that it lingered and bought daffodils and pink newspapers and ephemeral air-balls from my companions of the gutter, and even sometimes gave me a coin as well as an amused smile. One liked it almost as well when the wind blew up unimportant showers, so hurriedly and unexpectedly that the rain seemed almost out of breath when it came; for this turned the bit of western sky that blocked the end of the street into a fine country sky, that ought to have swept across a moor instead of scudding past a London Tube station. But when it snowed, or rained long and uncompromisingly, and when the wind blew swift and cold without blowing up anything interesting with it, there were no street effects and no smiles, and the public shut its impressionable heart against colour and pink news and polemics, and everything else we were hawking; and one learned suddenly the meaning of being passed by. Perhaps it was worth learning--one of those odd, disagreeable experiences that are worth gathering up by the way when you stand on the edge of a London pavement, helping to fill a war chest for rebel women. Certainly I might not otherwise have reached the heart of my fellows in the gutter. "It's a 'ard life, ain't it?" said the flower-lady sympathetically. I had known her in the past, too--the past that seemed so long ago and yet dated back only to last week--had sometimes bought flowers of her because she looked cold, and had generally found her unprepossessing and much inclined to grumble. I thought I knew now, as I stamped my feet to keep warm, and shook my box invitingly in front of cold and distant people who refused to be invited, how very much she might have had to grumble at. The queer part of it was that she was not grumbling now; she had ceased to grumble, in fact, for the very reason that made me understand for the first time why she should grumble. Standing there beside her, in God's rain that knew no respect of persons, I was no longer a client out of whom another penny might with tact be wheedled; I was just a boon companion, bent like herself on wheedling that penny from a miserly public that eternally hurried by. So she gave me her pity, though I wore a fur coat and she only a threadbare shawl, and the same biting wind bit at us both. The newspaper sellers at first held aloof; so did the girl who sold air-balls.