Life, the Interpreter by Phyllis Bottome

"Mercy every way / Is infinite-and who can say? "

THERE was a high west wind, and the dust swirled in clouds at the street corners. It was the kind of wind that never lets one alone, and is constantly drawing attention to the inconveniences of one's clothing. The clouds were the dull brown of approaching rain, drifting in rags across the chilly sky. Cynthia Grant, who had been all the night before and half the day through fighting over the undesirable life of a mother and child, felt almost aggrieved that she had saved them both. "What did I want to do it for? The whole system's rotten! Why should it be considered mercy to prolong the agony instead of cutting it short? I don't care for the woman; I hate the child; and, even if I liked them both, I don't think their lives worth living. Why that drunken brute of a husband, who is always throwing chairs at the poor thing, should say ‘Thank God! ' when I told him she'd live is a puzzle; he could easily have got some one fresh to throw chairs at, and the brat is only one mouth more to feed! I feel far more sympathy for that woman with ten children who told me she had had ‘no churchyard luck'. " She chuckled grimly to herself, and looked with a tolerant, amused gaze at the narrow alley, with its children at play in the gutters, wizened and old, with sharp, cruel, degraded little faces, slatternly women at doors, and skulking forms, that were scarcely human, lurking in corners and in the wretched rooms that were called "living," a phrase more applicable to the vermin that inhabited them than the half-human creatures that sprawled there. It was a bad alley, and the tough knotted stick in Cynthia's hand did not look out of place.