Turner Road is perhaps the most hopeless of all the dozen and a half of streets. (It is marked black, by the way, in Mr. Booth’s instructive map.) It is about a quarter of a mile long and perfectly straight.  It is intersected at one point by another street, and is composed of tall dark houses, with flat fronts, perhaps six or seven stories in height.  It is generally fairly silent and empty, and is inhabited by the most characteristic members of the Hackney Wick community—­quiet, white-faced men, lean women, draggled and sharp-tongued, and countless over-intelligent children—­all of the class that seldom remain long anywhere—­all of the material out of which the real criminal is developed.  No booths or stalls ever stand here; only, on Saturday nights, there is echoed here, as in a stone-lined pit, the cries and the wheel-noises from the busy thoroughfare a hundred yards away round the corner.  The road, as a whole, bears an aspect of desperate and fierce dignity; there is never here the glimpse of a garden or of flowers, as in Mortimer Road, a stone’s throw away.  There is nothing whatever except the tall, flat houses, the pavements, the lampposts, the grimy thoroughfare and the silence.  The sensation of the visitor is that anything might happen here, and that no one would be the wiser.  There is an air of horrible discretion about these houses.

* * * * *

Mrs. Partington was—­indeed is (for I went to see her not two months ago)—­of a perfectly defined type.  She must have been a handsome factory girl—­dark, slender, and perfectly able to take care of herself, with thin, muscular arms, generally visible up to the elbow, hard hands, a quantity of rather untidy hair—­with the tongue of a venomous orator and any amount of very inferior sentiment, patriotic and domestic.  She has become a lean, middle-aged woman, very upright and very strong, without any sentiment at all, but with a great deal of very practical human experience to take its place.  She has no illusions about either this world or the next; she has borne nine children, of which three survive; and her husband is almost uninterruptedly out of work.  However, they are prosperous (for Turner Road), and have managed, so far, to keep their home together.

The sunset was framed in a glow of smoky glory at the end of the street down which Mrs. Partington was staring, resembling a rather angry search-light turned on from the gates of heaven.  The street was still quiet; but already from the direction of the Board-school came thin and shrill cries as the swarm of children exploded in all directions.  Mrs. Partington (she would have said) was waiting for her children—­Jimmy, Maggie and ’Erb—­and there were lying within upon the bare table three thick slices of bread and black jam; as a matter of fact, she was looking out for her lodgers, who should have arrived by midday.

Then she became aware that they were coming, even as she looked, advancing down the empty street en echelon.  Two of them she knew well enough—­they had lodged with her before; but the third was to be a stranger, and she was already interested in him—­the Major had hinted at wonderful mysteries....