us enough, and was long-suffering, so that her resentment took the
general form of silences and secret broodings upon their different
fortunes. There was a great deal to be said about this difference, and
the saying grew more and more remote from explicit utterance as thought
of it ground into Emmy's mind through long hours and days and weeks of
solitude. Pa could not hear anything besides the banging of pots, and he
was too used to sudden noises to take any notice of such a thing; but
the pots themselves, occasionally dented in savage dashes against each
other or against the taps, might have heard vicious apostrophes if they
had listened intently to Emmy's ejaculations. As it was, with the
endurance of pots, they mutely bore their scars and waited dumbly for
superannuation. And every bruise stood to Emmy when she renewed
acquaintance with it as mark of yet another grievance against Jenny. For
Jenny enjoyed the liberties of this life while Emmy stayed at home.
Jenny sported while Emmy was engaged upon the hideous routine of kitchen
affairs, and upon the nursing of a comparatively helpless old man who
could do hardly anything at all for himself.

Pa was in his bedroom,--the back room on the ground-floor, chosen
because he could not walk up the stairs, but must have as little trouble
in self-conveyance as possible,--staggeringly making his toilet for the
meal to come, sitting patiently in front of his dressing-table by the
light of a solitary candle. He would appear in due course, when he was
fetched. He had been a strong man, a runner and cricketer in his youth,
and rather obstreperously disposed; but that time was past, and his
strength for such pursuits was as dead as the wife who had suffered
because of its vagaries. He could no longer disappear on the Saturdays,
as he had been used to do in the old days. His chair in the kitchen, the
horse-hair sofa in the sitting-room, the bed in the bedroom, were the
only changes he now had from one day's end to another. Emmy and Jenny,
pledges of a real but not very delicate affection, were all that
remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those
old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough
boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular
companions. He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless
scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in
ancient neglect; and his eyes would thereafter, perhaps at