There was a pause in the conversation, and Mary, to humour her mother, threw up the window and let in the roar of the trams, the far-off clang of the steel hammers at the forge, and the rancid smell of the fried-fish shop preparing for the evening's trade. The old woman listened attentively to catch the sound which she longed for more than anything else in the world, but the street noises drowned everything. She sank back in her chair and took up the garment she was at work on. But her mind was busy, and after a few minutes she turned again to her daughter.
"Thoo'll not be thinkin' o' havin' a day i' t' coontry this month, Mary?"
"Nay, I'm noan sich a fool as to want to go trapsin' about t' lanes an' t' ditches. I've my work to attend to, or we'll not get straight wi' t' rent."
"Aye, we're a bit behind wi' t' rent sin thoo com back frae thy week i' Blackpool."
"Now don't you be allus talkin' about my week i' Blackpool; I reckon I've a right to go there, same as t' other lasses that works at Cohen's."
"I wasn't complainin', Mary."
"Eh! but I know you were; and that's all t' thanks I get for sendin' you them picture postcards. You want me to bide a widdy all my life, and me nobbut thirty-five."
"Is there sae mony lads i' Blackpool, that's thinkin' o' gettin' wed?"
"By Gow! there is that. There's a tidy lot o' chaps i' them Blackpool boarding-houses, an' if a lass minds her business, she'll have hooked one afore Bank Holiday week's out."
Again there was silence in the workroom, and the needles worked busily. The daughter was moodily brooding over the matrimonial chances which she had missed, while the mother's thoughts were going back to her youth and married life, when she lived at the foot of the Hambledon Hills, in a cottage where corn-fields, scarlet with poppies in summer-time, reached to her garden gate. At last the old woman timidly re-opened the conversation.