Jenny was cheerfully contemptuous.  She knew what was being worn along Regent Street and in Bond Street, because she saw it with her own eyes.  Then she came home and saw the girls of her own district swanking about like last year’s patterns, as she said.  She couldn’t help laughing at them.  It made her think of the tales of savages wearing top hats with strings of beads and thinking they were all in the latest European fashion.  That is the constant amusement of the expert as she regards the amateur.  She has all the satisfaction of knowing better, without the turmoil of competition, a fact which distinguishes the superior spirit from the struggling helot.  Jenny took full advantage of her situation and her knowledge.

“Yes, you know a lot,” Emmy said dryly.

“Ah, you’ve noticed it?” Jenny was not to be gibed at without retort.  “I’m glad.”

“So you think,” Emmy added, as though she had not heard the reply.

There came at this moment a knock at the front door.  Emmy swayed, grew pale, and then slowly reddened until the colour spread to the very edges of her bodice.  The two girls looked at one another, a deliberate interchange of glances that was at the same time, upon both sides, an intense scrutiny.  Emmy was breathing heavily; Jenny’s nostrils were pinched.

“Well,” at last said Jenny, drawlingly.  “Didn’t you hear the knock?  Aren’t you going to answer it?” She reached as she spoke to the hat lying upon the plate rack above the gas stove, looking fixedly away from her sister.  Her air of gravity was unchanged.  Emmy, hesitating, made as if to speak, to implore something; but, being repelled, she turned, and went thoughtfully across the kitchen to the front door.  Jenny carried her hat into the kitchen and sat down at the table as before.  The half-contemptuous smile had reappeared in her eyes; but her mouth was quite serious.

iii

Pa Blanchard had worked as a boy and man in a large iron foundry.  He had been a very capable workman, and had received as the years went on the maximum amount (with overtime) to be earned by men doing his class of work.  He had not been abstemious, and so he had spent a good deal of his earnings in what is in Kennington Park called “pleasure”; but he had also possessed that common kind of sense which leads men to pay money into sick and benefit clubs.  Accordingly, his wife’s illness and burial had, as he had been in the habit of saying, “cost him nothing.”  They were paid by his societies.  Similarly, when he had himself been attacked by the paralytic seizure which had wrecked his life, the societies had paid; and now, in addition to the pension allowed by his old employers, he received a weekly dole from the societies which brought his income up to fifty shillings a week.  The pension, of course, would cease upon his death; but so long as life was kept burning within him nothing could affect the amounts paid weekly into the Blanchard exchequer.