Her diet became a diet of milk and buns, tea, stale eggs, and bread and butter. She spent nothing on dress, and wore her shoes long after they should have gone to the cobbler. She planned to do most of her own washing at home, drying it in front of her sitting-room fire, and putting up with the moist, steamy smell and her landlady’s contemptuous face. Mrs. Buss’s affability was beginning to wear very thin, for it was a surface virtue at its best. Poverty does not always inspire that human pity that we read of in sentimental stories. Primitive peoples have a horror of sickness and death, and civilisation has developed in many of us a similar horror of tragic poverty. It is to be found both in people who have struggled, and in those who have never had to struggle, and Mrs. Buss belonged to the former class. To her, poverty was a sour smell that associated itself with early and bitter memories. It brought back old qualms of mean dread and envy. She had learnt to look on poverty as a pest, and anyone who was contaminated with it became a source of offence. She recognised all the symptoms in Eve’s pathetic little economies, and straightway she began to wish her out of the house.
Eve noticed that Mrs. Buss’s voice became a grumbling murmur when she heard her talking to her son. Intuition attached a personal meaning to these discontented reverberations, and intuition was not at fault.
“I haven’t slaved all my life to let rooms to people who can’t pay! I know how the wind blows! She’s getting that mean, meat once a week, and a scuttle of coal made to last two days! Next thing’ll be that she’ll be getting ill.”
Albert was not interested, and his mother’s grumblings bored him.
“Why don’t you turn her out?”
“I shall have to wait till she’s short with her week’s money. And then, you may have to wait a month or two before you can get another let. It’s a noosance and a shame.”
Eve began to answer the advertisements in one or two daily papers, and to spend a few shillings in advertising on her own account. The results were not encouraging. It seemed to be a meaner world than she had imagined it to be, for people wanted to buy her body and soul for less than was paid to an ordinary cook. In fact, a servant girl was an autocrat, a gentlewoman a slave. She rebelled. She refused to be sweated—refused it with passion.
She advertised herself as willing to give painting lessons, but nothing came of it, save that one of her advertisements happened to catch Mr. Parfit’s eyes. Sister Jane had called, and her brother had taken Eve twice to a theatre, and once to a concert. He dared to question her solicitously about the ways and means of life.
“How are you getting along, you know? Don’t mind me, I’m only everybody’s uncle.”
She did not tell him the worst.