The red-faced man reached for his hat and put it on with a sullen rakishness. He was looking at Eve out of the corners of his eyes. Being a drunkard, he was ugly-tempered in the morning, and the young woman had given him the cold shoulder. “Stuck up bit of goods. Looks like the lady. Been up to it, have yer? I know all about that. Governess, eh? Some old josser of a husband and a screechin’ wife, and out yer go into the street!” She was more struck by the vindictive, threatening way he spoke than by the vile things he said. Her impressions of the night grew more vivid and more pitiless. Something hardened in her. She felt cold and contemptuous, and quite capable of facing this human animal. “Be quiet, please!” She turned and looked at him steadily, and his dirty eyelids flickered. “Mayn’t I speak, blast yer?” “If you speak to me as you are speaking, I will stop the next constable and give you in charge.” “Goo’ lord! What the hell are you doin’ here, may I ask?” She kept her eyes on him. “I came here just for an experience, because I felt sorry for people, and wanted to see what a night here was like. I have learnt a good deal.” “Ah!” Something fell out of his face. It relaxed, his lower lip drooping. “You’ve learnt somethin’.” She felt pitiless, nauseated. “I have. I hope before long that we shall have the sense to put people like you in a lethal chamber. You would be better dead, you know.” Eve got up and walked away, knowing that in the future there would be certain creatures whom she could not pity—creatures whom she would look at with the eyes of Nature, eyes that condemn without pity. She wondered whether the amateurs who indulged in sentimental eugenics had ever spent a night sitting on a seat next to a degenerate sot. She doubted it. The reality would upset the digestion of the strongest sentimentalist. She felt so stiff and cold that she started to walk briskly in the direction of Westminster. A light, drizzling rain began to fall, making the city and the river look even dirtier and uglier, though there is a fascination about London’s courtesan ugliness that makes soft Arcadian prettiness seem inane and unprovocative. Nor does bad weather matter so much in a city, which is a consideration in this wet little island. Eve had not walked far before she discovered that she was hungry. No shops would be open yet, but in allowing some whim to take her across Westminster Bridge she happened on an itinerant coffee-stall at the corner of a side street. Her last two pennies went in a cup of coffee and two massive slabs of bread and butter. The keeper of the stall, a man with a very shiny and freshly shaved chin and cynical blue eyes, studied her rather doubtfully, as did a tram-driver and two workmen who came up for breakfast. Eve noticed that the men were watching her, behind their silence. Her presence there at such an hour was an abnormal phenomenon that caused them furiously to think.