[...] In earlier days I never used to worry about old people: I looked upon them as the dead whose legs still kept moving. Now I see them—men and women: only a little older than myself. I had noticed this old lady at the butcher’s one day when she asked for scraps for her cats. “For her cats!” he said when she had gone. “She hasn’t got a cat. Such a stew she’s going to make for herself!” The butcher found that amusing. Presently she will be picking up the leavings under the stalls before the tall Negro sweeps everything into the gutter. Making ends meet on a hundred and eighty francs a month: there are more than a million in the same plight: three million more scarcely less wretched.