In a momentary pause Robert saw a basket of onions exchanged for a hair comb and five fish for a string of beads.

The people in the market seemed better off than those in the crowd; they had finer clothes, and more of them.

They were the kind of people who, nowadays, would have lived at Brixton or Brockley.
'What's the trouble now ?' a languid, large-eyed lady in a crimped, half-transparent linen dress, with her black hair very much braided and puffed out, asked of a date-seller.
'Oh, the working-men--discontented as usual,' the man answered.

'Listen to them.

Anyone would think it mattered whether they had a little more or less to eat.