She rent the air of Budge Street with horrible execration; but she went to the factory, where, save for the intervals of retirement rendered necessary by the births of the little Buttons, she was contented enough to stay.
If Paul Kegworthy had been of the same fibre as the little Buttons, he would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history would never have been written.

He would have grown up to man's estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the football ground.

He might have been sober and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment, and the world outside Bludston would never have heard of him.

Paul, however, differed greatly from the little Buttons.

They, children of the grey cap and the red shawl, resembled hundreds of thousands of little human rabbits similarly parented.