f.

For this family of whom I am writing were, I confess, weak and human.
Their poverty they were ashamed of as though it were a crime, and in
consequence their life was more full of paltry and useless subterfuge
than should be perhaps the life of brave men and women. The larder,
I fancy, was very often bare, but the port and sherry with the sweet
biscuits stood always on the sideboard; and the fire had often to be low
in the grate that my father's tall hat might shine resplendent and my
mother's black silk rustle on Sundays.

But I would not have you sneer at them, thinking all pretence must
spring from snobbishness and never from mistaken self-respect. Some fine
gentleman writers there be--men whose world is bounded on the east by
Bond Street--who see in the struggles of poverty to hide its darns only
matter for jest. But myself, I cannot laugh at them. I know the long
hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the long cost of the
cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from the confectioner's.
But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous. Heroism is not all of one
pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of Wales come to see him, would
have put his bread and cheese and jug of beer upon the table, and helped
His Royal Highness to half. But my father and mother's tea was very weak
that Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith might have a glass of wine should they come
to dinner. I remember the one egg for breakfast, my mother arguing that
my father should have it because he had his business to attend to; my
father insisting that my mother should eat it, she having to go out
shopping, a compromise being effected by their dividing it between them,
each clamouring for the white as the most nourishing. And I know however
little the meal looked upon the table when we started I always rose well
satisfied. These are small things to speak of, but then you must bear in
mind this is a story moving in narrow ways.

To me this life came as a good time. That I was encouraged to eat
treacle in preference to butter seemed to me admirable. Personally, I
preferred sausages for dinner; and a supper of fried fish and potatoes,
brought in stealthily in a carpet bag, was infinitely more enjoyable
than the set meal where nothing was of interest till one came to the
dessert. What fun there was about it all! The cleaning of the doorstep
by night, when from the ill-lit street a gentleman with a piece
of sacking round his legs might very well pass