That period had been a dark patch upon the sunlit fabric of Joan’s life. Over it all brooded this Mrs. Pybus, frankly dirty while “doing” her house in the morning, then insincerely tidy in the afternoon. She talked continually to, at, and round about Joan. She was always talking. She was an untimely widow prone to brood upon the unpleasant but enormously importunate facts that married life had thrust upon her. She had an irresistible desire to communicate her experiences with an air of wisdom. She had a certain conceit of wisdom. She had no sense of the respect due to the ignorance of childhood. Like many women of her class and type she was too egotistical to allow for childhood.
Never before had Joan heard of diseases. Now she heard of all the diseases of these two profoundly clinical families, the Pybuses and the Unwins. The Pybus family specialized in cancers, “chumors” and morbid growths generally; one, but he was rather remote and legendary, had had an “insec’ in ’is ’ed”; the distinction of the Unwins on the other hand was in difficult parturitions. All this stuff was poured out in a whining monologue in Joan’s presence as Mrs. Pybus busied herself in the slatternly details of her housework.
“Two cases of cancer I’ve seen through from the very first pangs,” Mrs. Pybus would begin, and then piously, “God grant I never see a third.”
“Whatever you do, Joan, one thing I say never do—good though Pybus was and kind. Never marry no one with internal cancer, ’owever ’ard you may be drove. Indigestion, rheumatism, even a wooden leg rather. Better a man that drinks. I say it and I know. It doesn’t make it any easier, Joan, to sit and see them suffer.
“You’ve got your troubles yet to come, young lady. I don’t expec’ you understand ’arf what I’m telling you. But you will some day. I sometimes think if I ’adn’t been kep’ in ignorance things might have been better for me—all I bin called upon to go through.” That was the style of thing. It was like pouring drainage over a rosebud. First Joan listened with curiosity, then with horror. Then unavailingly, always overpowered by a grotesque fascination, she tried not to listen. Monstrous fragments got through to her cowering attention. Here were things for a little girl to carry off in her memory, material as she sickened for measles for the most terrifying and abominable of dreams.
“There’s poor ladies that has to be reg’lar cut open....
“I ’ad a dreadful time when I married Pybus. Often I said to ’im afterwards, you can’t complain of me, Pybus. The things one lives through!...
“’Is sister’s ’usband didn’t ’ave no mercy on ’er....
“Don’t you go outside this gate, Joan—ever. If one of these ’ere Tramps should get hold of you.... I’ve ’eard of a little girl....”
If a congenial gossip should happen to drop in Joan would be told to sit by the window and look at the “nice picture book”—it was always that one old volume of The Illustrated London News—while a talk went on that insisted on being heard, now dropping to harsh whispers, now rising louder after the assurance of Mrs. Pybus: