Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her, and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops, trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very poor:  but she could never see her visited by beauty.  For her it had stayed in the sunset.  It might have abode with her in the form of love:  indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were harder than her mother’s in the one point in which it could be harder and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard.  But she felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the free expenditure of her mother’s dearness had brought her no comfort of love.

She could remember no good of her father.  It was his habit to wear the Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws.  By neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of negativeness and turn them into positive wounds.  If he were going to send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not quite enough to pay the rent.  He was indeed a specialist in disappointment.  Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning them.  At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.

How her mother had been betrayed!  It was as monstrous a story as anything people made a fuss about in literature.  What had happened to Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother?  Her heart had broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the picturesque advantage.  And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago?  Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with concentration on the task of self-esteem,