For to Chook this frail girl with the bronze hair and shabby clothes was no longer a mere donah, but a laborious housewife and a potential mother of children; and to Pinkey this was a new Chook, who kept his hands to himself, and looked at her with eyes that made her forget she was a poor factory girl.
Chook looked idly at the stars, remote and lofty, strewn like sand across the sky, and wondered at one that gleamed and glowed as he watched.

A song of the music-hall about eyes and stars came into his head.

He looked steadily into Pinkey's eyes, darkened by the broad brim of her hat, and could see no resemblance, for he was no poet.

And as he looked, he forgot the stars in an intense desire to know the intimate details of her life--the mechanical, monotonous habits that fill the day from morning till night, and yet are too trivial to tell.
He asked some questions about Packard's factory where she worked, and Pinkey's tongue ran on wheels when she found a sympathetic listener.
Apart from the boot factory, the great events of her life had been the death of her mother, her father's second marriage, and the night of her elder sister, Lil, who had gone to the bad.

She blamed her stepmother for that.