time I gave you too much--I lost by you.' And having
wrung the price down to the lowest penny, she would pay it in clanking
silver and copper from a grimy leather bag she wore hidden in her
bosom; then, cramming the goods hastily into the maw of her sack, she
would stagger joyously away. The men's garments she would modestly
sell to a second-hand shop, but the women's she cleaned and turned and
transmogrified and sold in Petticoat Lane of a Sunday morning;
scavenger, earth-worm, and alchemist, she was a humble agent in the
great economic process by which cast-off clothes renew their youth and
freshness, and having set in their original sphere rise endlessly on
other social horizons.

Of English she had, when she began, only enough to bargain with; but
in one year of forced intercourse with English folk after her
husband's death she learnt more than in her quarter of a century of
residence in the Spitalfields Ghetto.

Fanny's function had been to keep house and prepare the evening meal,
but the old clo'-woman's objection to her marriage was not selfish.
She was quite ready to light her own fire and broil her own bloater
after the day's tramp. Fanny had, indeed, offered to have her live in
the elegant two-roomed cottage near King's Cross which Henry was
furnishing. She could sleep in a convertible bureau in the parlour.
But the old woman's independent spirit and her mistrust of her
son-in-law made her prefer the humble Ghetto garret. Against all
reasoning, she continued to feel something antipathetic in Henry's
clothes and even in his occupation--perhaps it was really the
subconscious antagonism of the old clo' and the new, subtly symbolic
of the old generation and the smart new world springing up to tread it
down. Henry himself was secretly pleased at her refusal. In the first
ardours of courtship he had consented to swallow even the Polish crone
who had strangely mothered his buxom British Fanny, but for his own
part he had a responsive horror of old clo'; felt himself of the great
English world of fashion and taste, intimately linked with the burly
Britons whose girths he recorded from his high stool at his
glass-environed desk, and in touch even with the _lion comique_, the
details of whose cheap but stylish evening dress he entered with a
proud flourish.

II

The years went by, and it looked as if the old woman's instinct were
awry. Henry did not go to the races, nor did Fanny have to fall back
on her mother