yet it was no less plain
that he was unwilling to be thought too tender. The curious thing was
that neither of us considered for a moment the possibility of any
reluctance staying the hand of the older neighbour. Him we both knew
fairly well as a man of that earlier period with which I am concerned
just now. At that period the village in general had a lofty contempt
for the "meek-hearted" man capable of flinching. An employer might have
qualms, though the men thought no better of him for that possession, but
amongst themselves flinching was not much other than a vice. In fact,
they dared not be delicate. Hence through all their demeanour they
displayed a hardness which in some cases went far below the surface, and
approached real brutality.

Leaving out the brutality, the women were not very different from the
men. It might have been supposed that their domestic work--the cooking
and cleaning and sewing from which middle-class women seem often to
derive so comely a manner--would have done something to soften these
cottage women. But it rarely worked out so. The women shared the men's
carelessness and roughness. That tenderness which an emergency
discovered in them was hidden in everyday life under manners indicative
of an unfeigned contempt for what was gentle, what was soft.

And this, too, was reasonable. In theory, perhaps, the women should have
been refined by their housekeeping work; in practice that work
necessitated their being very tough. Cook, scullery-maid, bed-maker,
charwoman, laundress, children's nurse--it fell to every mother of a
family to play all the parts in turn every day, and if that were all,
there was opportunity enough for her to excel. But the conveniences
which make such work tolerable in other households were not to be found
in the cottage. Everything had to be done practically in one room--which
was sometimes a sleeping-room too, or say in one room and a wash-house.
The preparation and serving of meals, the airing of clothes and the
ironing of them, the washing of the children, the mending and
making--how could a woman do any of it with comfort in the cramped
apartment, into which, moreover, a tired and dirty man came home in the
evening to eat and wash and rest, or if not to rest, then to potter in
and out from garden or pig-stye, "treading in dirt" as he came? Then,
too, many cottages had not so much as a sink where work with water could
be done; many had no water save in wet weather; the