During the course of the morning Mrs. Townsend went around with knitted brows, pondering deeply over the vexed question. Her back ached and her feet were weary long before her household labours were ended. She wasn’t accustomed to doing her own work, and, though she was willing, experience, that time-saver, was not hers. Mrs. Townsend knew that ladies were popularly supposed to bring a deftness and daintiness to kitchen work that was lacking in the efforts of a rougher class, but for herself it was just the opposite. The scalding kettles and saucepans she carried would perform a tremolo movement with the shaking of her slight wrists that sent greasy splashes of the contents over the kitchen floor; the beef-steak she broiled took in not only the fire but the whole top of the range in its sputterings, and plates and dishes, whether empty or filled with food for the table, slipped from her tired fingers and broke with ruinous celerity. After all the ceaseless effort of her heroic incapacity she was forced to long for the look of shining cleanliness accomplished easily by the strong, accustomed arms of an ordinary “girl.”
And the children were going half-clothed, she had so little time to sew! If this sort of thing didn’t stop soon she didn’t know what would become of them all. Depression had grown to be her usual frame of mind in the morning when there was no one to look at her. She had known that Francis couldn’t get a place when he was so shabby. People were afraid of men who looked poor; it seemed as if they couldn’t be capable. In spite of himself she must save him, though he hurled javelins at her afterwards. She would have gone and bought him the trousers out of hand if remembrance had not brought uncomfortably to mind a time when she had tried to demonstrate how economically she could regulate his smoking by purchasing an advertized box of cigars from a department store. To Polly Townsend, if you did a certain thing one certain effect ought to follow—that, instead, it ramified off into all sorts of different ways was the mean advantage life took over theory. She felt now that if she could only make her Francis buy those trousers he couldn’t help realizing gratefully afterwards how wise and good she’d been, and her heart glowed at the prospect.
But Mr. Effingham! He was a man whose old-fashioned punctiliousness was notably affected by externals: by suitable dress, by polish of manner, by a certain air in addition to more solid requirements. It was bad enough for Francis to hand the plate in those hideous, old, faded, mended trousers, but to go supplicantly in them to Mr. Effingham would be suicidal. She could have wept at the thought.
Yet later in the day Mrs. Townsend might have been seen with a face lightened by a persistent smile—a jimpy, sly, inwardly-lurking, swiftly-flashing, three-cornered gleam that took in two reckless eyes and a demure mouth, and brought forth curious comment from Mrs. Whymer, a friend whom she met in the street.
“How well you do look! No one would think you had a girl of ten—but you always did have colour. I feel all dragged out; the doctor says I’m just going on my nerves. My husband has been home all day. No, there’s nothing really the matter with him, just one of his attacks, but he always gets so worried about himself. I often tell him, when he sits there looking so depressed, if he only knew all I go through without saying a word! Having a man around the house is so upsetting, but I suppose you’re used to it. Mr. Townsend hasn’t anything yet, I believe?”
“He has several positions in view,” said Mrs. Townsend with elegant indefiniteness, and a quick, hot resentment at the implied reproach, which was answerable for the expenditure of twenty-five cents of her little hoard for peaches to be used in the manufacture of the deep peach pie which her Francis loved.
She derived an exquisite satisfaction from outwitting him in this way, forcing her money thus secretly down his throat, watching him eat each mouthful, and meeting his raised eyebrows and the “Isn’t this a little extravagant?” with the reassuring answer:
“Now, it’s all right; I just want you to enjoy it. No, Frankie, no more; you had a large plateful.”
“You made papa be helped three times,” said Frankie.
Her husband put an affectionate arm around her when she came up-stairs afterwards. “Fixed those trousers for me to-day, dear?”