[Rob Jensen]

to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were
two entries to the house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on
an alley.
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in
the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the
sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a
Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about
her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies" diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she
was singing in a powerful contralto:

It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of
countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-
section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed
without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a
versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful
rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and
the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in
the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and
yet the room seemed cu