Read "Life, the Interpreter" by Phyllis Bottome online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"What's the use of crying when the mother that bore ye (Mary, pity women! ) knew it all afore ye?"
THE club room, large and bare, with a bench or two and one long table, was full of girls, though at first glance you might not have been inclined to call them so. They were all so inexpressibly old. As they stood talking in groups, large and broad, with their frowsy hair and draggle-tailed dresses, lifting loud, rough voices and breaking from time to time into hoarse roars of laughter, they could scarcely be called prepossessing. These were the girls who had warned a simple-minded lady Bible-reader that "if she didn't tyke 'erself orf they'd strip her"-and they would have done it.