Andrew got up and went out of the room.  Fanny shut her mouth hard, and drew her thread through with a jerk.

“Well,” she said, in a second, “take off your things, and let me show you how to start on them.  There’s a little knack about it.”

Chapter LVI

That was a hard winter for Rowe.  Aside from the financial stress, the elements seemed to conspire against the people who were so ill-prepared to meet their fury.  It was the coldest winter which had been known for years; coal was higher, and the poor people had less coal to burn.  Storm succeeded storm; then, when there came a warm spell, there was an epidemic of the grippe, and doctors’ bills to pay and quinine to buy—­and quinine was very dear.

The Brewsters managed to keep up the interest on the house mortgage, but their living expenses were reduced to the smallest possible amount.  In those days there was no wood laid ready for kindling in the parlor stove, since there was neither any wood to spare nor expectation of Robert’s calling.  Ellen and her mother sat in the dining-room, for even the sitting-room fire had been abolished, and they heated the dining-room whenever the weather admitted it from the kitchen stove, and worked on the wrappers for their miserable pittance.

The repeated storms were in a way a boon to Andrew, since he got many jobs clearing paths, and thus secured a trifle towards the daily expenses.

In those days Mrs. Zelotes watched the butcher-cart anxiously when it stopped before her son’s house, and she knew just what a tiny bit of meat was purchased, and how seldom.  On the days when the cart moved on without any consultation at the tail thereof, the old woman would buy an extra portion, cook it, and carry some over to her son’s.

Times grew harder and harder.  Few of the operatives who had struck in Lloyd’s succeeded in obtaining employment elsewhere, and most of them joined the union to enable them to do so.  There was actual privation.  One evening, when the strike was some six weeks old, Abby Atkins came over in a pouring rain to see Ellen.  There were a number of men in the dining-room that night.  Amos Lee and Frank Dixon were among them.  It was a singular thing that Andrew, taking, as he had done, no active part in any rebellion against authority, should have come to see his house the headquarters for the rallies of dissension.  Men seemed to come to Andrew Brewster’s for the sake of bolstering themselves up in their hard position of defiance against tremendous odds, though he sat by and seldom said a word.  As for Ellen, she and her mother on these occasions sat out in the kitchen, sewing on the endless seams of the endless wrappers.  Sometimes it seemed to the girl as if wrappers enough were being made to clothe not only the present, but future generations of poor women.  She seemed to see whole armies of hopeless, overburdened women, all arrayed in these slouching garments, crowding the foreground of the world.