Molly acquiesced after enough protest, chiefly because she had begun to wonder if it would be quite easy to have an occasional tete-a-tete with men friends without having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire gracefully.  She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season to all her particular friends.  Molly could not find out details, but she more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre’s daughter made up part of Adela’s story, although she could not imagine how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.

This woman, Mrs. Moloney, had cleaned out the flat before Molly and Miss Carew took possession.

High up in a small room in a block of workmen’s buildings in West Kensington, Pat Moloney lay dying.  He and his wife had been thriftless and uncertain, they drifted into marriage, drifted in and out of work, and, having watched their children grow up with some affection and a good deal of neglect, had now seen them drift away, some back to the old country, and some to the Colonies.

Mrs. Moloney counted on her fingers to remember their number and their ages, and spoke with almost more realisation of the personalities of three little beings that had died in infancy than of the living men and women and their children.

Moloney was far too ill by the time Molly Dexter came to see him to speak of anything distinctly.  Three years ago he had fallen from a ladder and had refused to go into the hospital, in which decision he had been supported by his wife, who “didn’t hold” with those institutions.  A kindly, rough, clever young doctor had since treated him for growing pain and discomfort, and had prophesied evil from the first.  Pat kept about and, when genuinely too ill for regular work, took odd jobs and drifted more and more into public houses.  He had never been a thorough drunkard, and had been free from other vices, though lazy and self-indulgent.  But pain and leisure led more and more to the stimulants that were poison in his condition.  At last a chill mercifully hastened matters, and Pat, suffering less than he had for some months past, was nearing his end in semi-consciousness.  Molly Dexter then descended on the Moloneys in one of her almost irresistible cravings to relieve suffering.

Ordinary human nature when not in pain was often too repugnant to Molly for her to be able to do good works in company with other people.  She was, as she had told Edmund Grosse, a born anti-clerical, and she scorned philanthropists; so her best moods had to work themselves out alone and without direction.  Nor was she likely to spoil the recipients of her attentions, partly from the strength of her character, partly because the poor know instinctively whether they are merely the objects on which to vent a restless longing to relieve pain, or whether they are loved for themselves.