Jane's heart gave a throb. "Well?"
Her mother applied herself painstakingly to the apron and petticoat of the dancer—a petticoat striped in purple and green, and sprigged over with some species of flower wholly non-botanical. She drew her cloth down every stripe.
"They said they were hoping to find something just about in—in this neighborhood."
Jane shrank and trembled as if before a knife. "Well?"
Her mother passed on to the girl's slippers. She wiped the worn gilt of one stubby foot and then of the other. "They asked him to put a price on—on—"
"On our home!" cried Jane. There was a tear in each eye as she bowed her head over the mantel-piece.
Her mother returned to the Rock of Ages, and began to dust it again—as carefully as before.
"Well," she said, slowly, without turning round, "there's a building of that same sort a block or two south of us, already." She lingered on the short arm of the cross. "The Blackburns are talking of going, you know."
Jane bowed her head again and picked at the fringe of the mantel-covering—a foolish thing that she herself had embroidered and draped. Now, for the first time, she formulated her mother. "I've half known it all along," she thought, "and now I know it for sure." In this moment she definitely saw her mother, not as a creature of the affections, but as a creature of, mere habit. "And it's been so for the last twenty years," thought the poor girl.
Eliza Marshall passed back to one of the candelabra; its cracked prisms tinkled as her broken talk went on. "Well, I don't know, I'm sure. Our last neighbors are leaving us. Business and boarding-houses all around. And Rosy wants to change. And there's so much noise and dirt, and so many peddlers and beggars. And—and—" She was thinking of Susan Bates's library, but would not permit herself a spoken reference to it. "And so much work to keep things tidy. And those miserable fellows breaking into our barn. I don't know, I'm sure."