"Who said, Channah? Who do you mean?"
"I mean Dorah! She said you were wasting the old man to a shadow and she was going to put a stop to it, for father's sake and everybody else's!"
"Wasting to a shadow! What about mother?"
"I know! But I didn't say anything! You know what it's like to argue with Dorah! But she was going to see father about it, sooner or later, and now that this has happened ... well, we'd best go and see her at once!"
"Not one word didst thou say to me!" complained Mrs. Massel.
"It's bad enough now we've got to; what dost thou want more, mutter?"
"Oh, but what are you driving at, Channah? What's the idea?"
"She's going to put up a bed for you in her back-room. Benjamin keeps a lot of stock there now, but they can put a little under your bed and the rest on the landing. You can pay her so much a week while your scholarship lasts, and if you don't get another, well, she says you'll just have to go in for tailoring or something; or Benjamin can take you on his rounds."
"Oh, hell!" groaned Philip.
There had never been much sympathy between his elder sister Dorah and himself. Although the fact was rarely referred to among the Massels, Reb Monash and his wife were already a widower and a widow respectively when they were married, Reb Monash bringing Dorah, and Mrs. Massel Channah, to the union. Their only children were Rochke, who died so tragically on the exodus of the family from Russia, and Philip, born some time later in Doomington. The common parent between Dorah and Philip, therefore, was Reb Monash, and the long conflict between the father and son had rendered less and less substantial the affection between the brother and sister. Dorah, a tall, squared-jawed angular woman, was in some ways more masculine and more forbidding than Reb Monash, and in all ways more evident to the eye in her Longton household than her demure husband, Benjamin, whose main concerns in life were his wife's temper and the state of his samples. From time to time she had startled Philip with sudden spurts of generosity, but these had become increasingly rarer during the last two years.