At last, when her sight was more or less familiarized with the spectacle of squalor, the significance of the woman's words came to her as to one awaking from a dream.
“Not a bit of food has passed my lips since yesterday at twelve o'clock, Miss, and Gawd strike me dead, Miss, if I ain't telling the blessed truth.”
“But why have n't you bought food?” asked Stella.
The woman stared at her. How could she understand Stellamaris?
“I have n't a penny in the world, Miss. The day afore yesterday a lady give me twopence, and I spent it in milk for the child. S'welp me, I did, Miss.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Stella, whose face had grown tense and white, “that it's impossible for you to get food for yourself and your baby?”
“That the two of you might die of starvation?”
“We 're a-dying of it now, Miss,” said the woman.
God knows that she lied. The tramp's life is not a path of roses, and it is not one suitable for the rearing of tender babes, and the fact of its possibility is a blot on our civilization; but the hard-bitten vagabond of the highroad has his or her well-defined means of livelihood. This was a mistress of mumpery.
She had passed the night in the comfortable casual ward of a workhouse five miles away, and had slept the dead sleep of the animal, and she and her baby had started the day with a coarse, though sustaining, meal. She was wandering on and on, aimlessly from workhouse to workhouse, as she had wandered from infancy, begging a sixpence here, and a plate of victuals there, impeded in her stray-cat freedom only by the brat in her arms, yet fiercely fond of it and regardful of its needs. She was a phenomenon that in our civilization ought not to exist. She was acquainted with hunger and thirst and privation; she was anything of misery that you like to describe; but she was not dying or likely to die of starvation.
The sociology of the tramp, however, was leagues outside the knowledge of Stellamaris. She looked at the woman in awful horror until her delicate face seemed to fade into a pair of great God-filled eyes.
“And you have no roof to shelter you from the cold and rain?”
After the manner of her kind the woman assured her that such was the fact. She put her head on one side, wheedling in the time-honoured way.