clothes and bearing an infant in her arms. Her misery had not yet imprinted on her face that writing which is legible to every one.
Karla felt more at ease. The narrow street to which she had come was flanked by a few cottages rather than houses and in front of them all stretched a long wall. Behind the wall were gardens and the little houses were almost invariably closed, because the people who inhabited them were employed during the day in other parts of the city. From the observation of people Karla was for the present free and that was all she just now demanded. Every place is not equally pleasing to us, the young look out for streamlets, woods, and meadows, old people yearn for the domestic circle, the fond beloved moon, stars, and the breath of evening-poverty is most at home amidst squalor and desolation. It is not always from insufficient conception of cleanliness that poverty associates more readily with dirt than with purity, poverty takes shelter in indifference so that it may not too vividly realize its wretchedness: clothe a beggar in rich garments and he either laughs at himself or weeps for himself. In rags he does not feel his humiliation, in splendour he is crushed beneath its weight.
To Karla at all events it seemed as though this deserted street nodded to her with a look of home. Not only because nothing in it outraged her feelings, but also because when she reflected on her previous home she said to herself with a flash of conviction that the old home was but borrowed but this was genuine. There was something of the humour which springs from anguish in all this, but without some ideal trappings her anguish of mind would have been intolerable. Another in Karla’s place would perhaps have committed suicide. But Karla’s feelings were not sufficiently developed to hurry her on with fatal exaltation to so dreadful a deed. She had not yet been driven to genuine tears, for if a few fell on the face of her baby daughter, they were more the tears of childhood than those of despairing misfortune.
Karla had not tasted a mouthful of food since the previous day, and her attention had not yet been drawn to this fact. That near threatening tension of nerves, that feverish frenzy of the mind had not as yet suffered the mere craving for nourishment to assert itself. Hence also it was that she had not hitherto shrunk from her misery because she did not know the whole of it. But when she was somewhat reconciled to her new existence in the deserted street and that tension of the nerves permitted it, hunger began
