The wife snorted viciously. "And my furniture? The beautiful furniture I toiled and scraped for, that he always grumbled at, though I saved it out of the housekeeping money, without its costing him a penny, and no man in London had better meals,—hot meat every day and fish for Sabbath, even when plaice were eightpence a pound,—and no servant—every scrap of work done with my own two hands! Now he carts everything away as if it were his."
"I suppose it is by law," Salvina said mildly.
"Law! I'll have the law on him."
"Oh, no, mother!" and Salvina shuddered. "Besides, he has left our clothes."
Mrs. Brill's eye lit up. "I see no clothes."
"In our rooms. The letter says so."
"And you still believe what he says?" She began to mount the stairs. "I am sure he packed in my Paisley shawl while he was about it. It is fortunate I wore all my jewellery. And you always say I put on too much!"
Sustained by this unanswerable vindication of her past policy, Mrs. Brill ascended the stairs without further wailing.
Salvina, whose sense of romance never exalted her above the practical, remembered now that her brother Lazarus might come back at any moment clamorously hungry. This pinned her to the concrete moment. How to get him some supper! And her mother, too, must be faint and tired. She ran into the kitchen, and found enough odds and ends left to make a meal, and even a cracked teapot and a few coarse cups not worth carrying away; and, with a sense of Robinson Crusoe adventure, she extracted light, heat, and cheerfulness from the obedient gas branch, which took on the air of a case of precious goods not washed away in the household wreck. When her mother at last came down, cataloguing the wardrobe salvage in picturesque Yiddish, Salvina stopped her curses with hot tea. They both drank, leaning against the kitchen-dresser, which served for a table for the cups.
Salvina's Crusoe excitement increased when her mother asked her where they were to sleep, seeing that even the beds had been spirited away.