That Lass o' Lowrie's

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CHAPTER I - A Difficult Case

They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district
might easily have been misled by their appearance, as they stood
together in a group, by the pit's mouth. There were about a dozen of
them there--all “pit-girls,” as they were called; women who wore a
dress more than half masculine, and who talked loudly and laughed
discordantly, and some of whom, God knows, had faces as hard and brutal
as the hardest of their collier brothers and husbands and sweethearts.
They had lived among the coal-pits, and had worked early and late at the
“mouth,” ever since they had been old enough to take part in the heavy
labor. It was not to be wondered at that they had lost all bloom of
womanly modesty and gentleness. Their mothers had been “pit-girls” in
their time, their grandmothers in theirs; they had been born in coarse
homes; they had fared hardly, and worked hard; they had breathed in the
dust and grime of coal, and, somehow or other, it seemed to stick to
them and reveal itself in their natures as it did in their bold unwashed
faces. At first one shrank from them, but one's shrinking could not
fail to change to pity. There was no element of softness to rule or even
influence them in their half savage existence.

On the particular evening of which I speak, the group at the pit's mouth
were even more than usually noisy. They were laughing, gossiping and
joking,--coarse enough jokes,--and now and then a listener might have
heard an oath flung out as if all were well used to the sound. Most of
them were young women, though there were a few older ones among them,
and the principal figure in the group--the center figure, about whom the
rest clustered--was a young woman. But she differed from the r