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Updated: July 20, 2025
After sitting all day over little problems in arithmetic, he set off in the evening in working clothes for the Avenue de l'Observatoire. There, between two tallow candles, in front of a hoarding covered with ballads in illustrated covers, a fellow was singing in a cracked voice to the accompaniment of a guitar. A number of workmen and work-girls stood round listening to the music.
At that hour there are work-girls and tired clerks, and the like worn-out anæmic humanity trying to get home for an hour or so of rest before bed, and they crowd round the 'buses very eagerly. They are little able to cope with her exuberant vitality, being ill-nourished and tired from the day's work, and she simply mows through them and fills up every vacant place they covet before their eyes.
He had seen girls thus in the woods of Vincennes and of Versailles in the student days of his youth: little work-girls fresh from châlets of the Jura or from vine-hung huts of the Loire, who had brought their poor little charms to perish in Paris; and who dwelt under the hot tiles and amidst the gilded shop signs till they were as pale and thin as their own starved balsams; and who, when they saw the green woods, laughed and cried a little, and thought of the broad sun-swept fields, and wished that they were back again behind their drove of cows, or weeding among the green grapes.
But at two o'clock he was back in the corner of the big room. Soon the work-girls went trooping past, making remarks. It was the commoner girls who worked upstairs at the heavy tasks of truss-making and the finishing of artificial limbs. He waited for Mr. Pappleworth, not knowing what to do, sitting scribbling on the yellow order-paper. Mr. Pappleworth came at twenty minutes to three.
He gazed at monuments dawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and on quays, watching people bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past in linked bands, beggars whine on the bridges, derelicts doze in the pale winter sun, mothers in mourning hasten by taking children to school, and street-walkers beat their weary rounds before the cafes. The day drifted on.
'Mind you bring the over-weight! the others screamed after her, and some current joke seemed to be involved in the injunction, for at once they all laughed as only work-girls can. Tilly was back in no time. She was a little, slim girl, with the palest and shortest of gold hair, and a pretty face spoilt with freckles. As at all times, she had her pocket full of sweets, and ate them incessantly.
In her hair she wore a great bunch of jasmine a flower which, at night, exhales a most intoxicating perfume. She was dressed simply, almost poorly, in black, as most work-girls are dressed in the evening. Women of the richer class only wear black in the daytime, at night they dress a la francesa.
It was the most interesting thing happening on the block at the moment, and of course he wanted to see it. Carlisle stared at Mr. Beirne's nephew, caught by his word. "Oh!..." said she. "So you think my father would be much happier if he stripped himself and his family to provide Turkish baths and and Turkish rooms for his work-girls? I must say I don't understand that kind of happiness.
You take it to make a short cut, to gain a few minutes. It is traversed by busy people whose sole aim is to go quick and straight before them. You see apprentices there in their working-aprons, work-girls taking home their work, persons of both sexes with parcels under their arms.
Martin Theatre.* But how many stories it recalled hampers of poor little creatures brought up from the provinces and deposited at the hospital by carriers; the stolen babes of Duchesses, here cast into oblivion by suspicious-looking men; the hundreds of wretched work-girls too who had here rid themselves of their unfortunate children.
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