had listened intently to Emmy’s ejaculations.  As it was, with the endurance of pots, they mutely bore their scars and waited dumbly for superannuation.  And every bruise stood to Emmy when she renewed acquaintance with it as mark of yet another grievance against Jenny.  For Jenny enjoyed the liberties of this life while Emmy stayed at home.  Jenny sported while Emmy was engaged upon the hideous routine of kitchen affairs, and upon the nursing of a comparatively helpless old man who could do hardly anything at all for himself.

Pa was in his bedroom,—­the back room on the ground-floor, chosen because he could not walk up the stairs, but must have as little trouble in self-conveyance as possible,—­staggeringly making his toilet for the meal to come, sitting patiently in front of his dressing-table by the light of a solitary candle.  He would appear in due course, when he was fetched.  He had been a strong man, a runner and cricketer in his youth, and rather obstreperously disposed; but that time was past, and his strength for such pursuits was as dead as the wife who had suffered because of its vagaries.  He could no longer disappear on the Saturdays, as he had been used to do in the old days.  His chair in the kitchen, the horse-hair sofa in the sitting-room, the bed in the bedroom, were the only changes he now had from one day’s end to another.  Emmy and Jenny, pledges of a real but not very delicate affection, were all that remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular companions.  He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in ancient neglect; and his eyes would thereafter, perhaps at the mere sense of helplessness, fill slowly with tears, until Emmy, smothering her own rough sympathy, would dab Pa’s eyes with a harsh handkerchief and would rebuke him for his decay.  Those were hard moments in the Blanchard home, for the two girls had grown almost manlike in abhorrence of tears, and with this masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share.  It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog, unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness something that they could only give by means of pats and half-bullying kindness.  At such times it was Jenny who left her place at the table and popped a morsel of food into Pa’s mouth; but it was Emmy who best understood the bitterness of his soul.  It was Emmy, therefore, who would snap at her sister and bid her get on with her own food; while Pa Blanchard made trembling scrapes with his knife and fork until the mood passed.  But then it was Emmy who was most with Pa; it was Emmy who hated him in the middle of her love because he stood to her as the living symbol of her daily inescapable servitude in this household.