Outside, she was disturbed to find as she walked home, that the street was full of people, in spite of the rain--of gaunt men and pinched women, who threw her hostile and sidelong glances as she passed. She hurried through them. How was it that she knew nothing of them--except, perhaps, of the few toadies and parasites among them? How was one to penetrate into this ugly, incomprehensible world of "the people"? The mere idea of trying to do so filled her with distaste and ennui. She was afraid of them. She wished she had not stayed so long with that old gossip, Mrs. Hammersley, and that there were not so many yards of dark road between her and her own gate. Where was George? She knew that he had gone up to the pits that afternoon to consult his manager about some defect in the pumping arrangements. She wished she had secured his escort for the walk home. But before she left the village she paused irresolutely, then turned down a side street, and went to see Mary Batchelor, George's old nurse, the mother who had lost her only son in his prime. When, a few minutes later, she came up the lane, she was flatly conscious of having done a virtuous thing--several virtuous things--that afternoon, but certainly without any pleasure in them. She did not get on with Mary, nor Mary with her. The tragic absorption of the mother--little abated since the spring--in her dead boy seemed somehow to strike Letty dumb. She felt pity, but yet the whole emotion was beyond her, and she shrank from it. As for Mary, she had so far received Lady Tressady's visits with a kind of dull surprise, always repeated and not flattering. Letty believed that, in her inmost heart, the broken woman was offended each time that it was not George who came. Moreover, though she never said a word of it to Tressady's wife, she was known to be passionately on the side of the strikers, and her manner gave the impression that she did not want to be talking with their oppressors. Perhaps it was this feeling that had reconciled her to the loutish lad who lived with her, and had been twice "run in" by the police for stone-throwing at non-union men since the beginning of the strike. At any rate, she took a great deal more notice of him than she had done.