The Matron had already turned to leave the room. Anne, held by the blind woman, looked again round the big room with its clean floor and battered inmates. The uneventful peace broken by the bickering of the old women, the babies bringing a double burden to their mothers, the blind woman, to whom all days were alike, seemed to be imprisoned for ever. She followed the Matron into the courtyard. Several men in bottle-green corduroys loitered there, and a tiny old woman shrivelled and imbecile, who ran to Anne the moment she appeared, holding her skirts high to her knees, skipping on one foot and then on the other. "I'll dance for a ha'penny! I'll dance for a ha'penny!" she whined. "Go on! dance, old lady," said one of the men who was carrying an empty drawer, which had just been scrubbed, to dry in the sunshine of the yard. He set it down, end upwards, and stood expectantly. The two other men paused also. "Go on! Aren't you going to begin?" said one of them. "She's a funny old thing, this one," said the Matron to Anne, stopping to watch, as the old woman, holding her skirts to her knees, her clogs clacking, and with a smile of imbecility fixed on her face, began to hop from one thin leg to the other, stamping slowly round on her heels in the artless manner of a child. All at once she stopped, and, pulling up her apron, put a corner of it in her mouth, hanging her head and giggling. "They're all looking at me, all them men," she giggled. "Fancy me dancing with all them men looking." One of the men broke into a laugh, which was changed immediately into an attack of asthma. "Dance again, old lady!" called a younger man, with the effects of hard drinking visible in his face. The shrunken and pitiful figure revolved several times, stamping on her heels, then stopped with the same grotesque coquetry. "She's a funny old thing, isn't she?" said the Matron to Anne. "She gives us many a laugh." "It's too humbling to look at. I cannot laugh," said Anne. "Poor old thing, to have come to that." "She doesn't know, you know," said the Matron. "You're wasting your pity. They're most of them better off in the infirmary here than they were outside. You've no idea what a dirty state _she_ was found in for one." "It's the painfulness of such a sight--age without honour," repeated Anne. "I've no time to think of that sort of thing," replied the Matron, as they began to ascend the wide stairs to the bed rooms, a woman, who was scrubbing the steps with sand, standing aside to let them pass.