Sonia Married Author:Stephen McKenna Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER TWO THE OPEN DOOR "I was a baby when my mother died And father died and left me in the street I starved there, God knows how, a year or two On fig-... more »skins, melon-parings, rinds and stalks, Refuse and rubbish. . . . But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets Eight years together, as my fortune was, Watching folk's faces to know who will fling The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires, And who will curse and kick him for his pains, Which gentleman processional and fine, Holding a candle to the Sacrament, Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch The droppings of the wax to sell again, Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped, How say I?nay, which dog bites, which lets drop His bone from the heap of offal in the street, Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike, He learns the look of things, and none the less For admonition from the hunger-pinch." Robert Browning: Fra Lippo Lippi. It was not until I had introduced some little organisation into my work that I had opportunity or justification for seeing my friends. I have reached an age when I like to go early to bed between two long days of work; I never ceased to wonder, therefore, at the nervous vitality of some of the people whom I was meeting; London was fuller than I had ever known it, the customary autumn exodus had ended with the war; and, what with a few hundred officers home on leave and athirst for amusement, what with a few thousand girls working in hospitals, canteens and Government offices, anyone whowanted distraction had not to look long for it. The restlessness which seized London every summer before the war seemed to have increased and become permanent, with an astounding new licence which I found hard to understand. I suppose the war broke down most of the old social con...« less