She was thinking how she had heard that Jim had been seen driving in Wenham with Aggie Morse several times lately.  Aggie Morse had been Aggie Bemis, Jim’s old sweetheart.  She had married a well-to-do merchant in Wenham, who died six months before and left her with considerable property.  It was her own smart little turn-out in which she had been seen with Jim.

Eva was working in the shop, and Jim had been out of employment for nearly a year, and living on his wife.  There was a demand for girls and not for men just then, so Jim loafed.  His old mother cared for the house as well as she was able, and Eva did the rest nights and mornings.  At first Jim had tried to help about the house-work, but Eva had interfered.

“It ain’t a man’s work,” said she.  “Your mother can leave the hard part of it till I get home.”  Eva used to put the money she earned surreptitiously into her husband’s pockets that he might not feel his manly pride injured, but she defeated her own ends by her very solicitude.  Jim Tenny began to reason that his wife saw his shame and ignominious helplessness, else she would not have been so anxious to cover it.  The stoop of discouragement which Eva used to fear for his shoulders did not come, but, instead, something worse—­the defiant set-back of recklessness.  He took his wife’s earnings and despised himself.  Whenever he paid a bill, he was sure the men in the store said, the minute his back was turned, “It’s his wife’s money that paid for that.”  He took to loafing on sunny corners, and eying the passers-by with the blank impudence of regard of those outside the current of life.  When his wife passed by on her way from the shop he nodded to her as if she were a stranger, and presently followed her home at a distance.  He would not be seen on the street with her if he could avoid it.  If by any chance when he was standing on his corner of idleness his little girl came past, he melted away imperceptibly.  He could not bear it that the child should see him standing there in that company of futility and openly avowed inadequacy.  The child was a keen-eyed, slender little girl, resembling neither father nor mother, but looking rather like her paternal grandmother, who was a fair, attenuated woman, with an intelligence which had sharpened on herself for want of anything more legitimate, and worn her out by the unnatural friction.  The little Amabel, for Eva had been romantic in the naming of her child, was an old-fashioned-looking child in spite of Eva’s careful decoration of the little figure in the best childish finery which she could muster.

Little Amabel was reading a child’s book at another window.  When Mrs. Zelotes entered she eyed her with the sharpness and inscrutable conclusions therefrom of a kitten, then turned a leaf in her book.

When Mrs. Zelotes had greeted her daughter-in-law and Eva, she looked with disapproval at Amabel.

“When I was a little girl I should have been punished if I hadn’t got up and curtsied and said good-afternoon when company came in,” she remarked, severely.