S30 'GOD'S PEACE'
OCTOBER.
XXII T ^ r E stop outside a long, narrow, dirty yellow
VV house in a narrow side-street. In each
window, sheltered by wall-flowers and geraniums,
sits an old woman with a coloured knitted shawl
round her shoulders.
In this house, I tell Greta, live the poor old women who are not grand enough to become members of the institution. The house consists of one long room, divided by cotton hangings into twenty cubicles, ten on each side, in each of which an old woman lives. When I was a child, one of them was called Ann Marie. She is the only person from whom I ever inherited anything.
Ann Marie was a consumptive sewing-maid. I do not know exactly how old she was, but she must have been pretty well on in years to have got one of the charitable cubicles. The last time I saw her she had still her childlike face, with a smooth, white skin and two smiling, brown eyes. She had the tiniest figure I have ever seen. Like a modest little shadow, she crept along the street, wearing her peasant cap and a green woollen shawl round her slender shoulders. She lived rent free in the house, but had to find her own food. This she did by sewing for people in the town, having a day each week with six different families. Any great ability in the art of the needle Ann Marie did not possess, but nobody excelled her in the way of darning and patching, and there never was a linen or woollen garment ragged enough for her to throw
