es had one dress and one cap, both black
and void of ostentation; but on Sundays and holidays she would appear
metamorphosed. She had carefully preserved the bulk of her stage
wardrobe, even to the paste-decked shoes and tinsel jewelry. Shapeless
in classic garb as Hermia, or bulgy in brocade and velvet as Lady
Teazle, she would receive her few visitors on Sunday evenings, discarded
puppets like herself, with whom the conversation was of gayer nights
before their wires had been cut; or, her glory hid from the ribald
street beneath a mackintosh, pay her few calls. Maybe it was the unusual
excitement that then brought colour into her furrowed cheeks, that
straightened and darkened her eyebrows, at other times so singularly
unobtrusive. Be this how it may, the change was remarkable, only
the thin grey hair and the work-worn hands remaining for purposes of
identification. Nor was the transformation merely one of surface.
Mrs. Peedles hung on her hook behind the kitchen door, dingy, limp,
discarded; out of the wardrobe with the silks and satins was lifted down
to be put on as an undergarment Miss Lucretia Barry, like her costumes
somewhat aged, somewhat withered, but still distinctly "arch."

In the room next to me lived a law-writer and his wife. They were very
old and miserably poor. The fault was none of theirs. Despite copy-books
maxims, there is in this world such a thing as ill-luck-persistent,
monotonous, that gradually wears away all power of resistance. I
learned from them their history: it was hopelessly simple, hopelessly
uninstructive. He had been a schoolmaster, she a pupil teacher; they had
married young, and for a while the world had smiled upon them. Then came
illness, attacking them both: nothing out of which any moral could be
deduced, a mere case of bad drains resulting in typhoid fever. They had
started again, saddled by debt, and after years of effort had succeeded
in clearing themselves, only to fall again, this time in helping a
friend. Nor was it even a case of folly: a poor man who had helped them
in their trouble, hardly could they have done otherwise without proving
themselves ungrateful. And so on, a tedious tale, commonplace, trivial.
Now listless, patient, hard working, they had arrived at an animal-like
indifference to their fate, content so long as they could obtain the
bare necessities of existence, passive when these were not forthcoming,
their interest in life limited to the one luxury of th