She looked gently pained when I explained rather obviously that I should consider that a condescension, and so would the right sort of man; and my companions looked with puzzled eyes after the retreating lady who seemed to belong to a strange world out of their ken, in which helplessness had a market value. It was pleasantly illuminating to find, however, as the week wore on, that they had come to accept me as an equal, not because I could hold my own against the passer-by, but because they saw me, like themselves, exposed to all the discomforts of being passed by. That, I am sure, is why the elderly paper-seller gave me so much friendly information about goloshes, and why the lame boy observed so sympathetically, one wet evening, that I had had a quiet day. "Yes; nice and quiet, wasn't it?" I answered gladly, being a militant suffragist of many and strenuous experiences that would not generally be called either nice or quiet. It was only when I caught his astonished expression that I understood him to be referring, not to political passions, but to trade. Even when you are filling the war chest at the edge of the pavement it is not impossible, I find, to spare a little pity for those who pass as well as for those who are passed by. "_L'homme oisif tue le temps; le temps tue l'homme oisif_," as it is expressed by the nation that knows better than any other, possibly, how to kill time gracefully. Time seemed to be killing a good many idle people, I thought, during the week of days that I stood outside that Tube station. The habitual hawker, of course, was a loiterer by profession; so was the friendly constable who remarked, "Well, you ladies do have to face somethink, you do!" referring, I imagine, to the snow, which was soft and soothing compared to some of the street witticisms I had to face in the course of business. The real waster was rather the person who stood at the entrance of the station, sometimes for hours, waiting, not for something to happen, or even in most cases for somebody to come, but just waiting. Sometimes the idler was a man. For one whole afternoon it was a man with a pale and purposeless blue eye that stamped him at once as being one of those who, in killing time, are being gradually killed by it. He said something about the weather to the policeman, something about the winners to the boy who sold pink information about winners; but he did not spend a halfpenny on the information, nor did he look as though he had spent a halfpenny on information in the whole of his life. Even when a motor-car broke down opposite, he did not cross the road to look at it. You have to be really interested in life, I suppose, to form one of a street crowd.