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‘I’m turned eighteen, sir.’
He was fair, and he had not a hair on his face, he looked
no more than a boy; he was short, but thick set.
‘You’re young to be married,’ said Philip.
‘We ‘ad to.’
‘How much d’you earn?’
‘Sixteen, sir.’
Sixteen shillings a week was not much to keep a wife and
child on. The room the couple lived in showed that their
poverty was extreme. It was a fair size, but it looked quite
large, since there was hardly any furniture in it; there was
no carpet on the floor; there were no pictures on the walls;
and most rooms had something, photographs or supple-
ments in cheap frames from the Christmas numbers of the
illustrated papers. The patient lay on a little iron bed of the
cheapest sort. It startled Philip to see how young she was.
‘By Jove, she can’t be more than sixteen,’ he said to the
woman who had come in to ‘see her through.’
She had given her age as eighteen on the card, but when
they were very young they often put on a year or two. Also
she was pretty, which was rare in those classes in which the
constitution has been undermined by bad food, bad air, and
unhealthy occupations; she had delicate features and large
blue eyes, and a mass of dark hair done in the elaborate
fashion of the coster girl. She and her husband were very
nervous.
‘You’d better wait outside, so as to be at hand if I want
you,’ Philip said to him.
Now that he saw him better Philip was surprised again at

Of Human Bondage