‘You just let me hear you talk about leaving, that’s all! Wait till I’ve talked it over with Sam.’
Jane went upstairs, and for the rest of the day the house was very quiet.
Not Whitehead’s; there were other places where work might be found. And before many days she had found it. Happily there were no luxuries to be laid aside; her ordinary dress was not too good for the workroom. She had no habits of idleness to overcome, and an hour at the table made her as expert with her fingers as ever.
Returning from the first day’s work, she sat in her room—the little room which used to be hers—to rest and think for a moment before going down to Bessie’s supper-table. And her thought was:
‘He, too, is just coming home from work. Why should my life be easier than his?’
CHAPTER XXXIX
SIDNEY
Look at a map of greater London, a map on which the town proper shows as a dark, irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness of suburban districts, and just on the northern limit of the vast network of streets you will distinguish the name of Crouch End. Another decade, and the dark patch will have spread greatly further; for the present, Crouch End is still able to remind one that it was in the country a very short time ago. The streets have a smell of newness, of dampness; the bricks retain their complexion, the stucco has not rotted more than one expects in a year or two; poverty tries to hide itself with venetian blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of houses shall justify the existence of the slum.
Characteristic of the locality is a certain row of one-storey cottages—villas, the advertiser calls them—built of white brick, each with one bay window on the ground floor, a window pretentiously fashioned and desiring to be taken for stone, though obviously made of bad plaster. Before each house is a garden, measuring six feet by three, entered by a little iron gate, which grinds as you push it, and at no time would latch. The front door also grinds on the sill; it can only be opened by force, and quivers in a way that shows how unsubstantially it is made. As you set foot in the pinched passage, the sound of your tread proves the whole fabric a thing of lath and sand. The ceilings, the walls, confess themselves neither water-tight nor air-tight. Whatever you touch is at once found to be sham.
In the kitchen of one of these houses, at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in September, three young people were sitting down to the dinner-table: a girl of nearly fourteen, her sister, a year younger, and their brother not yet eleven. All were decently dressed, but very poorly; a glance at them, and you knew that in this house there was little money to spend on superfluities. The same impression was produced by the appointments of the kitchen, which was disorderly, too, and spoke neglect of the scrubbing-brush. As for the table, it was ill laid and worse supplied. The meal was to consist of the fag-end of a shoulder of mutton, some villainously cooked potatoes (à l’Anglaise) and bread.
‘Oh, I can’t eat this rot again!’ cried the boy, making a dig with his fork at the scarcely clad piece of bone. ‘I shall have bread and cheese. Lug the cheese out, Annie!’