“They want me to go into the ‘Ouse,’” reaching the dangerous subject at last.  “They say I’ll be took care of an’ looked after.  But I don’t want to do it, miss.  I want to keep my bit of a ‘ome if I can, an’ be free to come an’ go.  I’m eighty-three, an’ it won’t be long.  I ’ad a shilling a week from the parish, but they stopped it because they said I ought to go into the ‘Ouse.’”

She looked at Betty with a momentarily anxious smile.

“P’raps you don’t quite understand, miss,” she said.  “It’ll seem like nothin’ to you—­a place like this.”

“It doesn’t,” Betty answered, smiling bravely back into the old eyes, though she felt a slight fulness of the throat.  “I understand all about it.”

It is possible that old Mrs. Welden was a little taken aback by an attitude which, satisfactory to her own prejudices though it might be, was, taken in connection with fixed customs, a trifle unnatural.

“You don’t mind me not wantin’ to go?” she said.

“No,” was the answer, “not at all.”

Betty began to ask questions.  How much tea, sugar, soap, candles, bread, butter, bacon, could Mrs. Welden use in a week?  It was not very easy to find out the exact quantities, as Mrs. Welden’s estimates of such things had been based, during her entire existence, upon calculation as to how little, not how much she could use.

When Betty suggested a pound of tea, a half pound—­the old woman smiled at the innocent ignorance the suggestion of such reckless profusion implied.

“Oh, no!  Bless you, miss, no!  I couldn’t never do away with it.  A quarter, miss—­that’d be plenty—­a quarter.”

Mrs. Welden’s idea of “the best,” was that at two shillings a pound.  Quarter of a pound would cost sixpence (twelve cents, thought Betty).  A pound of sugar would be twopence, Mrs. Welden would use half a pound (the riotous extravagance of two cents).  Half a pound of butter, “Good tub butter, miss,” would be ten pence three farthings a pound.  Soap, candles, bacon, bread, coal, wood, in the quantities required by Mrs. Welden, might, with the addition of rent, amount to the dizzying height of eight or ten shillings.

“With careful extravagance,” Betty mentally summed up, “I might spend almost two dollars a week in surrounding her with a riot of luxury.”

She made a list of the things, and added some extras as an idea of her own.  Life had not afforded her this kind of thing before, she realised.  She felt for the first time the joy of reckless extravagance, and thrilled with the excitement of it.

“You need not think of Brexley Union any more,” she said, when she, having risen to go, stood at the cottage door with old Mrs. Welden.  “The things I have written down here shall be sent to you every Saturday night.  I will pay your rent.”

“Miss—­miss!” Mrs. Welden looked affrighted.  “It’s too much, miss.  An’ coals eighteen pence a hundred!”