In the afternoon another woman was brought in beaten for debt. She was not seriously injured, but she was very frightened, and it was that which marked her apart from the usual anger and misery of those hurt. She was almost silent as Hester and Margaret tended to her shallow, painful knife cuts. She would not say who had inflicted them on her, no lies and no truth, but they were very obviously intentionally made. No imaginable accident could have caused such vicious and repeated slicing of the flesh.

She stayed a few hours, until they were certain the bleeding was stopped and the woman had at least partially recovered from shock. Margaret wished her to stay longer, but shaking her head, she picked up her torn shawl, once a pretty thing with flowers and fringes, and went out into the square toward the Farringdon Road.

Margaret stood in the middle of the room and looked around at the tidy cupboards, the scrubbed tabletops and the floor.

Hester shrugged. “I suppose we should be glad there’s nobody else hurt,” she said with an attempt at a smile. “Do you want to go home? There really isn’t anything to do, and Bessie’ll be in later, if anything should happen.”

Margaret grimaced. “And trail around behind Mama, calling on nice ladies who look at me with kindly despair and wonder why I haven’t accepted a reasonable offer of marriage?” she said wryly. “Then they’ll assume that there is something terribly wrong with me . . . too indiscreet to mention, and they will think I have lost my virtue!” She gave a little grunt of frustration. “Why is it that young women are presumed to have only two possible virtues—chastity and obedience?” she demanded with sudden fierceness. “What about courage, or honesty of opinion, not just a matter of not taking what does not belong to you?”

“Because they make people uncomfortable,” Hester replied without hesitation, but giving Margaret a crooked, sympathetic smile.

“Can you imagine anything lonelier than being married to someone who always says what he thinks you want to hear, regardless of whatever it is that he thinks?” Margaret asked, her brows puckered in a frown. “It would be like living in a room full of mirrors, where every other face you saw was simply a reflection of your own.”

“I think it would be a very particular kind of hell,” Hester answered with a rush of wonder and pity that anyone could imagine they desired such a thing, and yet she knew many who thought they did. “You have a gift to put it into such vivid words,” she added with admiration. “Perhaps you should try to convey it visually sometime?”

“That would be something really worth drawing,” Margaret responded. “I am so bored with doing the predictable, just reproducing what I see in front of me, with no greater meaning.”

“I can barely draw a straight line,” Hester admitted.