Pa was fifty-seven, and normally would have had a respectable number of years before him; his wants were now few, and his days were carefully watched over by his daughters.  He would continue to draw his pensions for several years yet, unless something unexpected happened to him.  Meanwhile, therefore, his pipe was regularly filled and his old pewter tankard appeared at regular intervals, in order that Pa should feel as little as possible the change in his condition.

Mrs. Blanchard had been dead ten years.  She had been very much as Emmy now was, but a great deal more cheerful.  She had been plump and fresh-coloured, and in spite of Pa Blanchard’s ways she had led a happy life.  In the old days there had been friends and neighbours, now all lost in course of removals from one part of London to another, so that the girls were without friends and knew intimately no women older than themselves.  Mrs. Blanchard, perhaps in accord with her cheerfulness, had been a complacent, selfish little woman, very neat and clean, and disposed to keep her daughters in their place.  Jenny had been her favourite; and even so early had the rivalry between them been established.  Besides this, Emmy had received all the rebuffs needed to check in her the same complacent selfishness that distinguished her mother.  She had been frustrated all along, first by her mother, then by her mother’s preference for Jenny, finally (after a period during which she dominated the household after her mother’s death) by Jenny herself.  It was thus not upon a pleasant record of personal success that Emmy could look back, but rather upon a series of chagrins of which each was the harder to bear because of the history of its precursors.  Emmy, between eighteen and nineteen at the time of her mother’s death, had grasped her opportunity, and had made the care of the household her lot.  She still bore, what was a very different reading of her ambition, the cares of the household.  Jenny, as she grew up, had proved unruly; Pa Blanchard’s illness had made home service compulsory; and so matters were like to remain indefinitely.  Is it any wonder that Emmy was restive and unhappy as she saw her youth going and her horizons closing upon her with the passing of each year?  If she had been wholly selfish that fact would have been enough to sour her temper.  But another, emotionally more potent, fact produced in Emmy feelings of still greater stress.  To that fact she had this evening given involuntary expression.  Now, how would she, how could she, handle her destiny?  Jenny, shrewdly thinking as she sat with her father in the kitchen and heard Emmy open the front door, pondered deeply as to her sister’s ability to turn to account her own sacrifice.

iv