"Poor and content is rich and rich enough, but poor and genteel is—pardon slang—most tough!" remarked Rob, looking over her shoulder as she knelt before the oven, and making a wry face at Wythie, unconscious of the streak of soot on her chin.
"If you could be but one, which would you rather be, poor or genteel, Rob?" laughed her mother. But there was little laughter in the eyes under a brow upon which increasing anxiety was daily making its record.
"I don't know, Mardy; I'm not sure I could tell them apart. I'm like the ladies in Cranford, and have always known them together, but vulgarity would have its consolations. We shall be vulgarly rich when the bricquette machine is in the market," said Rob.
"And in the meantime?" hinted Wythie.
"Ah, in the meantime!" Rob took her bread from the oven and pulled herself on her feet by the aid of the lid-lifter, conveniently extending its handle from the back lid of the stove. Mother and daughters looked sadly through the open door into the dining-room and sighed. The sunshine struck the mahogany tea-table, with the clover-leaf corners of its dropped leaf; on the old mahogany sideboard, with its rounded ends and slender, straight legs and glass knob-handles, and on the old pewter tankards and platters, and the blue and white china standing upon it.
The Greys' troubles had reached a crisis; there was immediate and imperative need of ready money, and Aunt Azraella had been over on the preceding night "to talk common-sense" to her kindred-in-law.
"It's ridiculous," that Spartan woman had said, "for people situated as you are to have so much money tied up in old furniture. Here are these things—sideboard, table, chairs, pewter, old china; there are those old bureaus, the high-boy, the tester-bed, the bookcases, the work-tables—you have two—the old desk, not to mention the various chairs and tables scattered through the house. Even a dealer would give you a great deal for them, though private sale is better. But you cling to them, and won't part with them either way!"
"They are not only the delight of our eyes, Azraella; they are heirlooms from both sides. Some of them have been in the little grey house for more than a hundred years. How could we part with them?" Mrs. Grey gently replied.
"Necessity knows no law," Aunt Azraella answered, in one of those convenient pellets of wisdom always ready compounded for infallible persons to administer to the weak-minded. "I'll tell you what I will do, Mary. I will take the things off your hands at a fair appraisal, and give you cash down."
Mrs. Grey did not thank her; she had long known that Mrs. Winslow coveted the beautiful and venerable treasures of the little grey house, and longed to transfer them to her more pretentious, black-walnut-infested house on the hill. So Mrs. Grey did not feign gratitude for her offer; indeed, it inspired her with a perfectly natural desire to hold her splendid old mahogany at any cost. She said, firmly: "I shall not part with these things while we can exist without doing so, Azraella," and Mrs. Winslow had departed in highly disgusted dudgeon.