soul alive.  Tussie at this time became unable to see a sleek servant dart to help him take off his coat without saying something sharp to him, could not sit through a meal without making bitter comparisons between what they were eating and what the poor were probably eating, could not walk up his spacious staircase and along his lofty corridors without scowling; they, indeed, roused his contemptuous wrath in quite a special degree, the reason being that Priscilla’s stairs, the stairs up and down which her little feet would have to clamber daily, were like a ladder, and she possessed no passages at all.  But what of that?  Priscilla could not see that it mattered, when Tussie drew her attention to it.

Both Fritzing’s and her front door opened straight into their sitting-rooms; both their staircases walked straight from the kitchens up into the rooms above.  They had meant to have a door knocked in the dividing wall downstairs, but had been so anxious to get away from Baker’s that there was no time.  In order therefore to get to Fritzing Priscilla would have either to go out into the street and in again at his front door, or go out at her back door and in again at his.  Any meals, too, she might choose to have served alone would have to be carried round to her from the kitchen in Fritzing’s half, either through the backyard or through the street.

Tussie thought of this each time he sat at his own meals, surrounded by deft menials, lapped as he told himself in luxury,—­oh, thought Tussie writhing, it was base.  His much-tried mother had to listen to many a cross and cryptic remark flung across the table from the dear boy who had always been so gentle; and more than that, he put his foot down once and for all and refused with a flatness that silenced her to eat any more patent foods.  “Absurd,” cried Tussie.  “No wonder I’m such an idiot.  Who could be anything else with his stomach full of starch?  Why, I believe the stuff has filled my veins with milk instead of good honest blood.”

“Dearest, I’ll have it thrown out of the nearest window,” said Lady Shuttleworth, smiling bravely in her poor Tussie’s small cross face.  “But what shall I give you instead?  You know you won’t eat meat.”

“Give me lentils,” cried Tussie.  “They’re cheap.”

“Cheap?”

“Mother, I do think it offensive to spend much on what goes into or onto one’s body.  Why not have fewer things, and give the rest to the poor?”

“But I do give the rest to the poor; I’m always doing it.  And there’s quite enough for us and for the poor too.”

“Give them more, then.  Why,” fumed Tussie, “can’t we live decently?  Hasn’t it struck you that we’re very vulgar?”

“No, dearest, I can’t say that it has.”

“Well, we are.  Everything we have that is beyond bare necessaries makes us vulgar.  And surely, mother, you do see that that’s not a nice thing to be.”

“It’s a horrid thing to be,” said his mother, arranging his tie with an immense and lingering tenderness.