"Manage the shop? What shop?"
"The shop you have been speaking of—the grocer's shop."
"You yourself will manage it," Boult said. "Nice bright little concern as it is, the business won't keep a man; you will manage it, assisted on busy days by your eldest daughter."
But although Mrs. Day could not fight for herself, she was capable of defending her children. "To that I could not consent," she said; "I would never allow Bessie—Bessie!—to wait in a grocer's shop."
"It would not hurt her, ma'am. It would do her good."
Mrs. Day was silent, but her silence was eloquent. With shaking fingers she tied her bonnet strings—the wide black strings that wanted pulling out, the narrow white ones which must be arranged above them.
Boult, seeing that she was preparing to depart, assumed a more friendly tone. "You must not feel that you are being hustled into this thing," he said. "The money is, of course, in a sense, yours, although I have had to decide what to do with it."
Mrs. Day rose to go, Boult came forward with his hand extended.
"Anything that has to do with the people's food or drink pays," he said encouragingly. "If I had my time over again I would take up with the groshery line instead of the drapery. People must have food, ma'am. They must have it, even before frocks and furbelows."
"About Bernard?" Mrs. Day asked, waiving, not without dignity, the other subject.