Elsie's eyes grew moist.
"How touchy the girl is this morning!" thought Violet. "If she had to put up with what I have——"
And perhaps Violet was to be excused. How could she, with all her commonsense and experience of mankind, divine that stodgy Elsie's equanimity was at the mercy of any gust that windy morning? She could not.
She established the plant-pots on the window-sill. She had bought bulbs with the ten shillings so startlingly given to her by her husband, and with his reluctant approval. She had scrubbed the old plant-pots, stirred the soil in them, and embedded the bulbs. She put the pots out in the day-time and brought them in at night; she watered them when necessary in the bathroom. She tended them like a family of children. All unseen, they were the romance of her daily existence, her refuge from trouble, the balm of her anxieties. The sight of the clean, symmetrically arranged pots on the sills might have given the idea that a new era had set in for T. T. Riceyman's, that the terror of the curse of its vice had been exorcized by the secret workings within those ruddy pots. Violet hoped that it was so. But it was not so, and Elsie, in the primeval quality of her instincts, knew that it was not so. The bulbs were not pushing upwards to happiness; they were pushing upwards to sinister consummations, the approach of which rendered them absurd. And Elsie felt this too.
"Were you wanting me for anything particular, 'm?" Elsie asked, rather contrite about her windows and eager to appease.
"Yes, I should think I was wanting you for something! How dare you give me this money you put on my dressing-table?" She spoke with nervous exasperation, and produced from her pocket some coins wrapped in the bit of paper in which Elsie had wrapped them an hour or two earlier—the price of the ruined double saucepan, now replaced by Violet. "Take it back. You ought to have known I should never let you pay for it."
This after she had most positively insisted that Elsie should repair out of her resources the consequence of her unparalleled stupidity! The fact was that Violet, unsentimental and hard as she could be, and generally was, in "practical" matters, had been somewhat moved at the sight of the poor little coins in the dirty paper, deposited in the bedroom dumbly, without a word written or spoken. Also she happened that morning to be in a frame of mind favourable to emotion of certain sorts. She sniffed ominously, glancing at Elsie's face and glancing away. She could not bear to think that the lovable, loyal, silly creature had seriously intended to settle for the saucepan out of her wages.
Elsie, astonished and intimidated, took the money back as dumbly as she had paid it out.
"I'm that sorry, 'm," she murmured simply.
The little episode was closed. And yet Violet sniffed again, and her features slowly suffered distortion, and she began to cry. She was one who "never cried," and this was her third crying within a week! In truth it was not about the money at all that she had wanted to speak to Elsie. She said indistinctly through her tears: