the parlor he stood again and hung his monstrous look on her. He
seemed about to speak, but it was to Mrs. O'Connor his words went.

"How's everything?" said he, and then the door closed behind him.

Mary, with extraordinary slowness, knelt down again beside the bucket
and began to scrub. She worked very deliberately, sometimes cleaning
the same place two or three times. Now and again she sighed, but
without any consciousness of trouble. These were sighs which did not
seem to belong to her. She knew she was sighing, but could not
exactly see how the dull sounds came from her lips when she had no
desire to sigh and did not make any conscious effort to do so. Her
mind was an absolute blank, she could think of nothing but the bubbles
which broke on the floor and in the bucket, and the way the water
squeezed down from the cloth. There was something she could have
thought about if she wanted to, but she did not want to.

Mrs. O'Connor came out in, a few minutes, inspected the hall and said
it would do. She paid Mary her wages and told her to come again the
next day, and Mary went home. As she walked along she was very careful
not to step on any of the lines on the pavement; she walked between
these, and was distressed because these lines were not equally distant
from each other, so that she had to make unequal paces as she went.

XIX

The name of the woman from next door was Mrs. Cafferty. She was big
and round, and when she walked her dress whirled about her like a
tempest. She seemed to be always turning round; when she was going
straight forward in any direction, say towards a press, she would turn
aside midway so sharply that her clothing spun gustily in her
wake--This probably came from having many children. A mother is
continually driving in oblique directions from her household employments
to rescue her children from a multitude of perils. An infant and a
fireplace act upon each other like magnets; a small boy is always trying
to eat a kettle or a piece of coal or the backbone of a herring; a
little girl and a slop bucket are in immediate contact; the baby has a
knife in its mouth; the twin is on the point of swallowing a marble, or
is trying to wash itself in the butter, or the cat is about to take a
nap on its face. Indeed, the woman who has six children never knows in
what direction her next step must be, and the continual strain of
preserving her progeny converts many a one into regular cyclones of
e