Perhaps that was not just the name, but it was something equally high-sounding and aristocratic; and it seemed quite fitting that one of the dirty little cards that instructed the postman and the caller, should bear the pleasing name, “Blanche de Courcy.”  But Druse had never read novels.  Her acquaintance with fiction had been made entirely through the medium of the Methodist Sunday School library, and the heroines did not, as a rule, belong to the higher rank in which, as we know, the lords and ladies are all Aubreys, and Montmorencis, and Maudes, and Blanches.  Still even Druse’s untrained eye lingered with pleasure on the name, as she came in one morning, after having tasted the delights of life in the Vere de Vere for a couple of weeks.  She felt that she now lived a very idle life.  She had coaxed the three children into a regular attendance at school, and her uncle was always away until night.  She could not find enough work to occupy her, though, true to her training, when there was nothing else to do she scrubbed everything wooden and scoured everything tin.  Still there were long hours when it was tiresome to sit listening to the tramping overhead, or the quarrels below, watching the slow hands of the clock; and Druse was afraid in the streets yet, though she did not dare say so, because her bold, pert little cousins laughed at her.  She was indeed terribly lonely.  Her uncle was a man of few words; he ate his supper, and went to sleep after his pipe and the foaming pitcher of beer that had frightened Druse when she first came.  For Druse had been a “Daughter of Temperance” in East Green.  She had never seen any one drink beer before.  She thought of the poem that the minister’s daughter (in pale blue muslin, tucked to the waist) had recited at the Temperance Lodge meeting.  It began: 

  “Pause, haughty man, whose lips are at the brim
  Of Hell’s own draught, in yonder goblet rare—­”

She wished she had courage to repeat it.  She felt if Uncle John could have heard Lucinda recite it—.  Yet he might not think it meant him; he was not haughty, although he was a carpenter, and the beer he drank out of one of the children’s mugs.  But it troubled Druse.  She thought of it as she sat one afternoon, gravely crotcheting a tidy after an East Green pattern, before it was time for the children to be back from school.  It was a warm day in October, so warm that she had opened the window, letting in with the air the effluvia from the filthy street, and the discordant noises.  The lady in the flat above was whipping a refractory child, whose cries came distinctly through the poor floors and partitions of the Vere De Vere.

Suddenly there was a loud, clumsy knock at the door.  She opened it, and a small boy with a great basket of frilled and ruffled clothes, peeping from under the cover, confronted her.

“Say, lady,” he asked, red and cross, “Is yer name De Courcy?”

“No, it ain’t,” replied Druse.  “She’s the back flat to the right, here.  I’ll show you,” she added, with the country instinct of “neighboring.”