Her brother-in-law's success was with her something between an inspiration and a hobby. It became the absorbing interest in life, outside the chapel and her home. No wife, or mother, ever watched the progress of a husband, or son, with keener interest, or greater admiration, than Mrs. Bindle that of Mr. Hearty.
As a girl, she had been pleasure-loving. There were those who even went to the extent of regarding her as flighty. She attended theatres and music-halls, which she had not then regarded as "places of sin," and her contemporaries classified her as something of a flirt; but disillusionment had come with marriage. She soon realised that she had made the great and unforgivable mistake of marrying the wrong man. It turned her from the "carnal," and was the cause of her joining the Alton Road Chapel, at which Mr. Hearty worshipped.
From that date she began a careful and elaborate preparation for the next world.
Although she nightly sought the Almighty to forgive her her trespasses, volunteering the information that she in turn would forgive those who trespassed against her, she never forgave Bindle for his glib and ready tongue, which had obscured her judgment to the extent of allowing to escape from the matrimonial noose, a potential master-greengrocer with three shops.
There was nothing in her attitude towards Mr. Hearty suggestive of sentiment. She was a woman, and she bowed the knee at an altar where women love to worship.
"I call it——" Mrs. Bindle stopped short as Alice re-entered the room with a small dish of pickled onions, without which Mrs. Hearty would have found it impossible to sleep.
With a woman's instinct, Alice realised that Mrs. Bindle disapproved of her low-cut, pale blue blouse, and the short skirt that exposed to the world's gaze so much of the nether Alice.
"You ain't been lonely, mum?" she queried solicitously, as she took a final look round before going to bed, to see that everything was in order.
Mrs. Hearty shook her head and undulated violently.
"It's my breath," she panted, and proceeded to hit her chest with the flat of her doubled-up fist. "'Ad a nice time?" she managed to gasp in the tone of a mistress who knows and understands, and is known and understood by, her maid.