Well!--and what had he seen? Nothing, certainly, of which he had not had ample information before. Under the fresh spur of the talk that occupied the Maxwell circle he had made one or two rounds through some dismal regions in Whitechapel, Mile End, and Hackney, where some of the worst of the home industries to which, at last, after long hesitation on the part of successive Governments, Maxwell's Bill was intended to put an end, crowded every house and yard. He saw some of it in the company of a lady rent-collector, an old friend of the Maxwells, who had charge of several tenement blocks where the trouser and vest trade was largely carried on; and he welcomed the chance of one or two walks in quest of law-breaking workshops with a young inspector, who could not say enough in praise of the Bill. But if it had been only a question of fact, George would have felt when the rounds were done merely an added respect for Fontenoy, perhaps even for his own party as a whole. Not a point raised by his guides but had been abundantly discussed and realised--on paper, at any rate--by Fontenoy and his friends. The young inspector, himself a hot partisan, and knowing with whom he had to deal, would have liked to convict his companion of sheer and simple ignorance; but, on the contrary, Tressady was not to be caught napping. As far as the trade details and statistics of this gruesome slopwork of East London went, he knew all that could be shown him. Nevertheless, cool and impassive as his manner was throughout, the experience in the main did mean the exchange of a personal for a paper and hearsay knowledge. When, indeed, had he, or Fontenoy, or anyone else ever denied that the life of the poor was an odious and miserable struggle, a scandal to gods and men? What then? Did they make the world and its iron conditions? And yet this long succession of hot and smelling dens, this series of pale, stooping figures, toiling hour after hour, at fever pace, in these stifling backyards, while the June sun shone outside, reminding one of English meadows and the ripple of English grass; these panting, dishevelled women, slaving beside their husbands and brothers, amid the rattle of the machines and the steam of the pressers' irons, with the sick or the dying, perhaps, in the bed beside them, and their blanched children at their feet--sights of this sort, thus translated from the commonplace of reports and newspapers into a poignant, unsavoury truth, had at least this effect--they vastly quickened the personal melancholy of the spectator, they raised and drove home a number of piercing questions which, probably, George Tressady would never have raised, and would have lived happily without raising, if it had not been for a woman, and a woman's charm.