The women craned their necks to look.
A woman of about forty, drunken, bedraggled, dressed in dingy black, was pacing up and down the pavement in front of the barber's.

She blinked like a drunken owl, and stepped high on the level footpath as if it were mountainous.

And without looking at anything, she threw a string of insults at the barber, hiding behind the partition in his shop.

For seven years she had passed as his wife, and then, one day, sick of her drunken bouts, he had turned her out, and married Flash Kate, the ragpicker's daughter.

Sloppy Mary had accepted her lot with resignation, and went out charring for a living; but whenever she had a drop too much she made for the barber's, forgetting by a curious lapse of memory that it was no longer her home.