Chapter Two.
Jill pulled her mother’s hand fiercely inside her arm. The presence of the angry, upright girl had a sobering effect on the older women. A dim sense of shame and distress was stealing over her. She made violent efforts to keep from tottering, and, raising one powerful but shaking hand, tried to straighten her bonnet.
Jill walked past Mrs Stanley’s flat, without stopping to fetch her basket of flowers. When she reached the top landing of the house she slipped her hand into her mother’s pocket, took out the key which by then, and opened the door which led into the little flat. The flat consisted of two rooms and a narrow passage.
Still holding her mother by the arm, Jill went into the outer room. She found a box of matches, and, striking one, lit a candle which was placed on the round table.
“Now, mother, sit down,” she said, in a tender voice. “Here’s your own chair. Sit right down and rest a bit. I’ll be no time boiling the kettle, and then we’ll have a cup o’ tea both on us together; you’ll feel a sight better when you have had your tea, mother.”
The woman sat on the edge of the chair which Jill had pulled forward, she loosened her bonnet-strings, and let her untidy, disorderly bonnet fall off her head of thick black hair.
“I’ll never go and do it any more, Jill,” she said, after a pause. “The pain’s better now, and next time it comes I’ll bear it. I know I’m tipsy now, but, sure as my name’s Poll Robinson, you’ll see, Jill, as I’ll never go and do it again.”
“To be sure you won’t, mother. Don’t you fret. Forget all about it—forget as you were tipsy jest now in the street. You’ll soon be as right as ever you wor. I’ll fetch some cold water to bathe your face and hands, then you’ll feel prime. You cheer up, mother, darlin’, and forget what you ’as done.”
“But you won’t forget it, Jill. I’ve shamed you before the folk in the street, you can’t go and forget it, it’s contrary to nature.”