"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.
"I makes 'em," quoth I.
She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver, and I
had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.
"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I said.
"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous. Also, she
amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.
I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what little I
had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she gloated after me
even as I passed out to the street.
While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and 900,000
are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are registered as living
in common lodging-houses--known in the vernacular as "doss-houses." There
are many kinds of doss-houses, but in one thing they are all alike, from
the filthy little ones to the monster big ones paying five per cent. and
blatantly lauded by smug middle-class men who know but one thing about
them, and that one thing is their uninhabitableness. By this I do not
mean that the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is
that life in them is degrading and unwholesome.
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