ring Bob's absence
this poor old creature spent in a rocking-chair, nodding in and out of
sleep; and it was rather baby Susan, sprawling about the kitchen floor,
who kept an eye on her, than the reverse. Pearl's installation had
changed all that. Bob naturally expected any woman he chose to support
to work for her board and lodging; and it may be that at first Pearl had
been too grateful for any shelter to risk jeopardizing her good luck by
shirking. There seems to be no doubt that for a while she did her poor
utmost to keep house--but the sloven in her was too deeply rooted not to
flower.

By the time Susan was six or seven the interior condition of Bob's
house was too crawlingly unpleasant to bear exact description; and even
Bob, though callous enough in such matters, began to have serious
thoughts of giving Pearl the slip--not to mention his landlord--and of
running off with Susan to some other city, where he could make a fresh
start and perhaps contrive now and then to get something decent to eat
set before him. It never occurred to him to give Susan the slip as
well--which would have freed his hands; not because he had a soft spot
somewhere for the child, nor because he felt toward her any special
sense of moral obligation. Simply, it never occurred to him. Susan was
his kid; and if he went she went with him, along with his pipe, his shop
tools, and his set of six English razors--his dearest possession, of
which he was jealously and irascibly proud.

But, as it happens, Bob never acted upon this slowly forming desire to
escape; the desire was quietly checked and insensibly receded; and for
this Susan herself was directly responsible.

Very early in life she began to supplement Pearl's feeble housewifery,
but it was not until her ninth year that Susan decided to bring about a
domestic revolution. Whether or no hatred of dirt be inheritable, I
leave to biologists, merely thumbnailing two facts for their
consideration: Susan's mother had hated dirt with an unappeasable
hatred; her nightly, after-supper, insensate pursuit of imaginary
cobwebs had been one of Bob's choicest grievances against her. And
little Susan hated dirt, in all its forms, with an almost equal venom,
but with a brain at once more active and more unreeling. She had good
reason to hate it. She must either have hated it or been subdued to it.
For five years, more or less, she had lived in the midst of dirt and
suffered. It had seemed to her one of t