All the outlines were confused, blurred.

The cold penetrated to the very bones of the shivering city.
Rachel had just come in, wet and tired, bringing with her a roll of manuscript to be transcribed.

A woman waiting for her on the endless stone stairs had cursed her for taking the bread out of her mouth.
"He always employed me till you came," she shrieked, shaking her fist at her, "and now he gives it all to you because you're younger and better-looking." She gave the woman as much as she dared spare, the calculation did not take long, and went on climbing the stairs.
Something in the poor creature's words, something vague but repulsive in her remembrance of the man who paid her for the work by which she could barely live, fell like lead into Rachel's heart.

She looked out dumbly over the wilderness of roofs.

The suffering of the world was eating into her soul; the suffering of this vast travailing East London, where people trod each other down to live.
"If any one had told me," she said to herself, "when I was rich, that I lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow-creatures, that my virtue and ease and pleasure were bought by their degradation and toil and pain, I should not have believed it, and I should have been angry.