Near the Trafalgar Square
gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was
walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.
'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.
'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her
kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....
It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might under
the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnet
within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses, and
thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get
food.
Section 8
A day or so later--and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the
roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and
police embarrassment--he wandered out into the open country. He speaks
of the roads of that plutocratic age as being 'fenced with barbed wire
against unpropertied people,' of the high-walled gardens and trespass
warnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In
the air, happy rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes
about them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and along
the road swept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was
rarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even
in the field paths or over the open downs.
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