Lizerunt by Arthur Morrison — Read

Lizer was some months short of twenty-one when her third child was born. / The pickle factory had discarded her some time before, and since that / her trade had consisted in odd jobs of charing. Odd jobs of charing have / a shade the better of a pickle factory in the matter of respectability, / but they are precarious, and they are worse paid at that. In the East / End they are sporadic and few. Moreover, it is in the household where / paid help is a rarity that the bitterness of servitude is felt. Also, / the uncertainty and irregularity of the returns were a trouble to Billy / Chope. He was never sure of having got them all. It might be ninepence, / or a shilling, or eighteenpence. Once or twice, to his knowledge, it had / been half-a-crown, from a chance job at a doctor's or a parson's, and / once it was three shillings.

That it might be half-a-crown or three / shillings again, and that some of it was being kept back, was ever the / suspicion evoked by Lizer's evening homing. Plainly, with these / fluctuating and uncertain revenues, more bashing than ever was needed to / insure the extraction of the last copper; empty-handedness called for / bashing on its own account; so that it was often Lizer's hap to be / refused a job because of a black eye.