“What kind of work are ye doin’ here?” asked Norah, pointing to the cloth which Sheila was sewing.
“Shirt-finishin’,” Sheila replied. “For every shirt there’s two rows of feather-stitchin’, eight buttonholes and seven buttons sewed on, four seams and eight fasteners. It takes me over an hour to do each shirt and the pay is a penny farthing. I can make about fifteen pence a day, but out of that I have to buy my own thread. But ye’ll be tired, child, listenin’ to me clatterin’ here all night.”
“I’m not tired listenin’ to ye at all, but it’s sorrow that’s with me because life was so hard on ye,” said Norah. “Everything was black again’ ye.”
“One gets used to it all,” said Sheila with the air of resignation which sits on the shoulders of those to whom the keys of that delicious mystery known as happiness are forever lost. “One gets used to things, no matter how hard they be, and one doesn’t like to die.”
But now Norah listened almost heedlessly. Thoughts dropped into her mind and vanished with the frightful rapidity of things falling into empty space; and memories of still more remote things, faint, far away and almost undefined, were wafted against her soul.
In the morning she awoke to find herself lying in bed, the blankets on which the blue letters STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT were stamped wrapped tightly around her, and Sheila Carrol lying by her side. For a moment she wondered vaguely how she had got into the bunk, then raising herself on her elbow, she looked round the room.
The apartment was a very small one, with one four-paned window and two doors, one of which led, as Norah knew, out to the landing, and one, as she guessed, into the room belonging to old Meg, the woman whom Sheila had spoken of the night before. The window was cracked and crooked, the floor and doors creaked at every move, a musty odour of decay and death filled the whole place. A heap of white shirts was piled on the orange box that stood in the middle of the floor, one shirt, the “finishing” of which had not been completed, lay on an old newspaper beside the fireplace. It looked as if Sheila had become suddenly tired in the midst of her feather-stitching and had slipped into bed. She was now awake and almost as soon as she had opened her eyes was out of the blankets, had wrapped a few rags round her bony frame and was busy at work with her needle. Sleep for the woman was only a slight interruption of her eternal routine.