The sweet wrinkled face lifted and a thin voice said shrilly:
“It aint what you call rheumatism, ma’am; it’s paralism, that’s what I tells Dr. Frith.”
“You’re busy in your garden. I’ve been working very hard in mine. Your broad beans are in blossom. And you’ve planted out your French marigolds already.”
“Aye. But I doubt the frost ’ull nip ’em.”
She laughed; the pretty, brainless cackle of a very old woman—the light laugh something like a child’s and yet with the knell of decay in it.
“When I plants out they little seedlin’s I thinks o’ my children—all planted out; some in London, some on the hill. Some livin’ to blossom, some nipped by the frost. I’ve had thirteen, bless you! You’ll step inside?”
They went into the tiny living room, the strangely twisted mistress painfully leading the way. At a round table an old man sat at tea—bread, lettuce that had bolted, a handful of spring onions. The mahogany tray that Mrs. Clutton coveted was on a ledge beside the low-burning fire. The old wife stepped up to her husband and shook him none too gently by the shoulder, dropping her head at the same time, and shouting:
“Get up and let the ladies come to the fire.”
To them she added apologetically:
“He’s very old. I’m only seventy-eight, but he’s pretty nigh eighty. Deaf, too. I can’t make him hear—not when I wants him to do anything. I very offen say to him, ‘You don’t want to hear; you don’t want to hear, that’s what it is,’ I says.”