"Now, look here, Beth, just you shut up," said Jim. "You're always putting your oar in, and its deuced impertinent of a child like you, when I'm talking to my mother. She knows what I'm talking about, and you don't; but you'll be teaching her next, I expect. You're far too cheeky."
"I only wanted to know," Beth protested.
"That will do," said Mrs. Caldwell impatiently. She was put out by Jim's demand for money, which she had not got to spare, and found it a relief to expend some of her irritation on Beth. "Jim is quite right, and I won't have you hanging about always, listening to things you don't understand, and rudely interrupting."
"I thought we were at breakfast," Beth exclaimed, furious at being unjustly accused of hanging about.
"Be good enough to leave the table," said Mrs. Caldwell; "and you shall have nothing but bread and water for the rest of the day."
"It will be a dinner of herbs with contentment, then, if I have it alone," said Beth; for which impertinence she was condemned to be present at every meal.
Having extracted the money from his mother, Jim went off to the "United Kingdom," and came back in the afternoon, somewhat the worse for beer; but Mrs. Caldwell did not perceive it. He complained of the poor dinner, the cooking, and Beth's shabby appearance.
"How can you go out with me like that?" he said. "Why can't you dress properly? Look at my things! I'm decent."
"So should I be," said Beth, without malice, her eyes shining with mortification. "So should I be if anybody bought me decent clothes."
She did not think it unfair, however, that she should go shabby so that Jim might be well dressed. Nor did she feel it wrong, when the holidays were over, and the boys had gone, that she should be left idly drumming on the window-pane; that they should have every advantage while she had none, and no prospect but the uncertain chance of securing a husband if she held herself well and did as she was told—a husband whom she would be expected to obey whatever he might lack in the way of capacity to order. It is suffering which makes these things plain to a generous woman; but usually by the time she has suffered enough to be able to blame those whom it has been her habit to love and respect, and to judge of the wrong they have done her, it is too late to remedy it. Even if her faculties have not atrophied for want of use, all that should have been cultivated lies latent in her; she has nothing to fall back upon, and her life is spoilt.