'What'd you say if Ed'ard died for yer?' queried Hazel crudely.
'My dear! How unseemly! In the street!'
'And what'd I do if Foxy died for me?'
'Well, well, Foxy's only an animal.'
'So're you and me animals!' said Hazel so loudly that poor Mrs. Marston flushed all over her gentle old face.
'So indecent!' she murmured. 'My dear,' she said, when she had steered Hazel past the shop, 'you want a nice cup of tea. And I do hope,' she went on softly, putting a great deal of cream in Hazel's cup as she would have put lubricating oil on a stiff sewing-machine—'I do hope, my dear, you'll become more Christian as time goes on.'
'If Foxy died along of me,' said Hazel stubbornly—for, although grateful for the festive meal, she could not let her basic rule of life slip—'if Foxy died along of me, I'd die too. I couldna do aught else.'
'Things are very different,' said Mrs. Marston, flustered, flushed and helpless—'very different from what they used to be.'
'What for are they, Mrs. Marston?'
But that question Mrs. Marston was quite unable to answer. If she had known the answer—that the change was in herself, and that the world was not different, but still kept up its ancient war between love and respectability, beauty and mass—she would not have liked it, and so she would not have believed it.