iment. Why should she die? No,
she would fight hard. A girl or a boy? What did it matter? Nothing
mattered. Perhaps a girl would be nicer, and she should be called Rose.
And yet, on second thoughts, when you came to think of it, Rose was a
cold sort of a name, and Rosie was common. Why not call her Jenny? That
was better--with, perhaps, Pearl or Ruby to follow, when its
extravagance would pass unnoticed. A girl should always have two names.
But Jenny was the sweeter. Nevertheless, it would be as well to support
so homely a name with a really lady-like one--something out of the
ordinary.

Why had she married Charlie? All her relatives said she had married
beneath her. Father had been a butcher--a prosperous man--and even he,
in the family tradition, had not been considered good enough for her
mother, who was a chemist's daughter. Yet, she, Florence Unwin, had
married a joiner. Why _had_ she married Charlie? Looking back over the
seven years of their married life, she could not remember a time when
she had loved him as she had dreamed of love in the airy room over the
busy shop, as she had dreamed of love staring through the sunny window
away beyond the Angel, beyond the great London skies. Charlie was so
stupid, so dull; moreover, though not a drunkard, he was fond of
half-pints and smelt of sawdust and furniture polish. Her sisters never
liked, never would like him. She had smirched the great tradition of
respectability. What would her grandfather, the chemist, have said, that
dignified old man in brown velvet coat, treated always with deference,
even by her father, the jolly, handsome butcher? Florence Unwin married
to a joiner--a man unable to afford to keep his house free from the
inevitable lodger who owned the best bedroom--the bedroom that by right
should have been hers. She had disgraced the family and for no high
motive of passion--and once she was young and pretty. And still young,
after all, and still pretty. She was only thirty-three now. Why had she
married at all? But then her sisters did give themselves airs, and the
jolly, handsome butcher had enjoyed too well and too often those drives
to Jack Straw's Castle on fine Sunday afternoons under the rolling
Hampstead clouds, had left little enough when he died, and Charlie came
along, and perhaps even marriage with him had been less intolerable than
existence among the frozen sitting-rooms of her two sisters, drapers
wives though they both were.

And the aun