By chance Violet went down into the shop just after the first-post delivery and just before Henry came. She was always later in the shop on Monday mornings than on other mornings because on that day she prepared the breakfast herself and also attended personally to other "little matters," as she called them. Henry had already been into the shop, for such blinds as there were had been drawn up, and he had replenished the bookstand, but too soon for the letters. She noticed the accumulation of dirt in the shop, very gradual, but resistless. Although the two women cleaned the shop, and, indeed, the whole establishment, section by section, with a most regular periodicity, they could not get over the surface fast enough to cope with the unceasing deposit of dirt. And they could not cope at all with, for instance, the grime on the ceiling; to brush the ceiling made it worse. In Henry's eyes, however, the shop was as clean as on the wedding night, and he was as content with it as then; he deprecated his wife's lamentations about its condition. Certainly no one could deny that it still was cleaner than before her advent, and anyhow he could never again have tolerated another vacuum-cleaning, with its absurd costliness; he knew the limits of his capacity for suffering.
Violet unlocked the door and let in the morn, and shivered at the tonic. This act of opening the shop-door, though having picked up the milk she at once closed the door again, seemed to mark another stage in the process which Elsie had begun more than two hours earlier; it broke the spell of night by letting in not only the morn but dailiness. She gathered the envelopes together from the floor, and noticed one with a halfpenny stamp, which she immediately opened—furtively. Yes, it was the gas bill for the September quarter, the quarter which ought to be the lightest of the year. And was not! She deciphered the dread total; it affected her like an accusation of crime, like an impeachment for treason. She felt guilty, yet she had done her utmost to "keep the gas down." What would Henry say? She dared not let him see it.... And the electricity bill to follow it in a few days!... Unquestionably Elsie was wasteful. They were all alike, servants were, and even Elsie was not an exception.
At that moment Henry limped down the stairs. Violet hid the bill and envelope in the pocket of her pinafore-apron.
"Here are the letters," she said, seizing the little milk-can and moving forward to meet him. "Just put a match to the stove, will you? I'm late."
She went on towards the stairs.
"We surely shan't want the stove to-day," he stopped her. "We haven't needed it yet. It's going to be a beautiful day."
She had had the fire laid in the stove more than a week ago, perceiving, with her insight into human nature, that a fire laid is already half lighted.
"That's all very well for you—for you to talk like that," she laughed, hiding her disquiet with devilish duplicity under a display of affectionate banter. "You're going out, but I have to keep shop."
He was dashed.
"Well, you'll see later on. I won't light it now, at any rate. You'll see later on. Of course you must use your own judgment, my dear," he added, courteously, judicial, splendidly fair.