Help her! Why, she had scarcely flesh enough to cover her bones, nor clothing enough to provide a semblance of warmth. She needed food, clothing, rest, fresh air, and human sympathy. I knew that in her own wretched home she could not get them, so I started my Seaside Home of Rest for Weary Women. Here is a letter from her:
‘I am constantly thinking of your kindness, and I think that I should be ungrateful if I did not write to you. God has answered my prayer, for I asked Him to take me out of my trouble. Oh, sir, I have only had one day’s holiday in fifteen years, and that was when I went with my first little boy to a Sunday-school treat. I feel that I should like to have more faith in God. I believe in Him, I tell Him my troubles, but I have no faith, and I forget His day (she worked on Sundays). I want to be a happy woman, but my life has been so hard, so very hard. I am feeling stronger, but I cannot lose the horror of what I have done; but do believe me, for I am grateful to the magistrate and you for the great kindness shown to me.
Fifteen years of hopeless, unending toil and of practical starvation are enough to quench the hope that is said to ‘spring eternal in the human heart,’ and without hope there can be no faith. How could the woman believe in a God of Love? Her story is common enough. Down to my little Home at Walton there has been a procession of such women. I wish that I could march them before my readers, each poor woman carrying a ‘brown-paper parcel,’ for bags, portmanteaus, or boxes have not been seen among them. No elastic step among them. Bent bodies, faces wrinkled and like to discoloured parchment. Some younger bodies, but still whitish and bloodless faces, whose eyes are dull, and no sparkle of joy in them; plenty of passivity, but no glint of fire. Some with a child each, some with two, for the children must be cared for. Some, too, alas! bruised and battered, for even the passivity of a wage-earning machine wife is no security against the brutality of a husband when the ‘potion works within him.’
Such are the women for whom I have been compelled to care. Sometimes I go down and spend a week-end with them, and I would that I could do justice to a description of them. But I cannot. In the evening before they retire to the strange luxuries of clean sheets we gather round the piano and sing an evening hymn, and I listen to their quavering voices in every key and in no key at all.