THE WORLD SET FREE
quarters of the town. They had become stonily blind to anything but manifest disorder.
Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for twice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.
"I'm starving," he said to her abruptly.
"Oh! poor dear!" she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand. . . .
It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might under the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses, and thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get food.
§ 8.
A day or so later,—and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and police embarrassment—he wandered out into the open country.
He speaks of the roads of that plutocratic age
84
