“He’ll get used to it,” answered Nellie, grimly.

“How you do talk, Nellie!” said the other.  “To hear you sometimes one would think you hadn’t any heart.”

“I haven’t any patience.”

“That’s true, my young gamecock!” exclaimed a somewhat discordant voice.  Nellie looked round, brightening suddenly.

A large slatternly woman stood in the back doorway, a woman who might possibly have been a pretty girl once but whose passing charms had long been utterly sponged out.  A perceptible growth of hair lent a somewhat repulsive appearance to a face which at best had a great deal of the virago in it.  Yet there was, in spite of her furrowed skin and faded eyes and drab dress, an air of good-heartedness about her, made somewhat ferocious by the muscularity of the arms that fell akimbo upon her great hips, and by the strong teeth, white as those of a dog, that flashed suddenly from between her colourless lips when she laughed.

“That’s true, my young gamecock!” she shouted, in a deep voice, strangely cracked.  “And so you’re at your old tricks again, are you?  Talking sedition I’ll be bound.  I’ve half a mind to turn informer and have the law on you.  The dear lamb!” she added, to the other woman.

“Good morning, Mrs. Macanany,” said Nellie, laughing.  “We haven’t got yet so that we can’t say what we like, here.”

“I’m not so sure about that.  Wait till you hear what I came to tell you, hearing from little Jimmy that you were at home and going to have a holiday with a young man from the country.  We’ll sherrivvery them if he takes her away from us, Mrs. Phillips, the only one that does sore eyes good to see in the whole blessed neighborhood!  You needn’t blush, my dear, for I had a young man myself once, though you wouldn’t imagine it to look at me.  And if I was a young man myself it’s her”—­pointing Nellie out to Mrs. Phillips—­that I’d go sweethearting with and not with the empty headed chits that—­”

“Look here, Mrs. Macanany!” interrupted Nellie.  “You didn’t come in to make fun of me.”

“Making fun!  There, have your joke with the old woman!  You didn’t hear that my Tom got the run yesterday, did you?”

“Did he?  What a pity!  I’m very sorry,” said Nellie.

“Everybody’ll be out of work and then what’ll we all do?” said Mrs. Philips, evidently cheered, nevertheless, by companionship in misfortune.

“What’ll we all do!  There’d never be anybody at all out of work if everybody was like me and Nellie there,” answered the amazon.

“What did he get the run for?” asked Nellie.

“What can we women do?” queried Mrs. Phillips, doleful still.