“I can do it, if yer give me time,” she said, with quivering indignation. “If I take longer, I don’t charge so much.”
Al knew everything in the world about her; she was the typical “case”; he knew where and how she lived, what she earned and how she spent it. He cross-examined her and she answered him mendaciously, but he was able to sift the truth from the lies.
“Now, see here,” he said. “You’re sixty-five or so.” She declared, for working purposes, that she was fifty. “You’ve earned a rest. You’ve worked all your life.”
“I’m able—” she began.
“You’re not. Now, see here! I want you to go home—now. I’ll see that you get a living allowance from—from a certain source every week. It’s not charity, d’you understand, not charity. It’s what you have a right to demand from society. You can consider me the agent of society.”
Her education was incomplete and she did not understand the meaning of his terms.
“The Society give me coal last winter,” she observed. “I didn’t never—”
He didn’t trouble to explain that he represented nothing more than impartial justice.
“Take this now and go home,” he said. “And for God’s sake, don’t go crawling round scrubbing up anyone else’s floors, ever! Get drunk, if you want—”
“Oh, I never, never, never—”