s, at all events
our intimacy endured without rupture for many years.

At the outset I was given an inkling of the irascibility of his
temper, and my subsequent method, in all our intercourse, was simply
to leave him whenever he became quarrelsome, and to take up our
relations when next we met at the point immediately preceding that at
which temper had overcome him. At heart an honourable and I am sure
kindly man, Heron had a temper of remarkable susceptibility to
irritation. The stomachic causes which, as time went on, produced
melancholy and dense, black depression in me, probably accounted for
his eruptions of violent irascibility. And I fancy we were equally
ignorant and brutal in our treatment of our own physical weaknesses.

Heron certainly became one of my distractions, one of my human
interests outside work, at this time. But there was another, and the
other came closer home to me.

I suppose I spent seven or eight months in discovering that Mrs. Pelly
was a singularly unpleasant woman. But the thing did eventually become
plain to me, so plain indeed that it would have caused me to give up
my French window and writing-table and migrate once more, but for
certain considerations outside my own personal comfort. That Mrs.
Pelly consumed far more gin than was good for her became apparent to
me during my first week, if not my first day, in Howard Street. But as
she rarely entered my room, and our encounters were merely accidental
and momentary, this weakness would never have affected me much.

What did affect me was my very gradual discovery of the fact that this
woman treated her own daughter with systematic cruelty--a thing
happily unusual in her class, as it is also, I think, among the very
poor of London. At the end of eight or nine months my increasing
knowledge of Mrs. Pelly's harsh unkindness to Fanny had begun to weigh
on my mind a good deal. It was a singular case, in many ways. Here was
a girl, a young woman rather, in her twenty-first year, who to all
intents and purposes might be said to be carrying on with her own
hands the entire work of a house which sheltered five lodgers; and, as
a fact, it was rarely that a day passed without her suffering actual
physical violence at the hands of that gin-soaked termagant, her
mother.

The woman positively used to pinch Fanny in such a way as to leave
blue bruises on her arm. She used to pull her hair violently, slap her
face, and strike at her with any sort o