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Olive had been active enough, for years, in the city-missions; she too had scoured dirty children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the noises made the neighbours turn pale.
When she reached her capital there were few welcoming cheers; but as she rode over the cobblestones to Holyrood, the squalid wynds vomited forth great mobs of hard-featured, grim-visaged men and women who stared with curiosity and a half-contempt at the girl queen and her retinue of foreigners.
The city was mean and squalid in the morning, and conveyed a sense of derision and reproach the sweep-carriage-road of Regent Street; the Royal Academy, pretentious, aristocratic; the Green Park still presenting some of the graces of a preceding century. There were but three cabs on the rank.
"I must admit, though," she added, with an odd note in her voice, "that I admire his good sense in never accepting John's invitations to the house." And then, suddenly, to the consternation of her companion, her eyes filled with tears. The Interpreter looked away toward the beautiful country beyond the squalid Plats, the busy city, the smoke-clouded Mill.
I could almost venture to assert, that the dreadful eruption called Lepra, which is universal throughout Iceland, owes its existence rather to the total want of cleanliness than to the climate of the country or to the food. Throughout my subsequent journeys into the interior, I found the cottages of the peasants every where alike squalid and filthy.
In both, there were several knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of power enthroned on their distress.
As Cuckoo said, there was nothing at all to bring him so often. He liked her, he was sorry for her, he had even a deep-running sympathy for her, but he did not love her. Yet he was fascinated to come to her, and there were sometimes moments when he seemed taken possession of, led by the hand, to that squalid room and that squalid presence in it. Why was that? What led him? He could not tell.
They, if possible, were more squalid and wretched-looking than their mother; for though it was midwinter, not one of them was so fortunate as to possess a pair of shoes, but they had frequently to run out from the hut into the deep snow in their poor little bare feet, which were red, cracked, and bleeding from the cold.
Inside a small dugout a dingy oil lamp shed its murky rays upon squalid surroundings. The place was reeking with the offensive odours exhaled from the burning oil. The atmosphere was stifling. There were four occupants of this abode, and, stretched in various attitudes on dusty blankets spread upon the ground, they presented a strange picture. Two of these were Eskimos.
She wasn't sure that Peter ever felt such yearnings; he seemed quite contented with the ugly rooms in the ugly street, and the dingy lace curtains and impossible pictures; he could make a joke of it all; and things one could make a joke of couldn't really hurt, thought Rhoda. But anyhow, cramped and squalid and dingy though 9 Greville Street might be, it held security and peace.
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