sent Mrs Jupp for me. Mrs Jupp hurried so fast to fetch me, that in
spite of the weather's being still cold she was "giving out," as she
expressed it, in streams. The poor old wretch would have taken a cab,
but she had no money and did not like to ask Towneley to give her some. I
saw that something very serious had happened, but was not prepared for
anything so deplorable as what Mrs Jupp actually told me. As for Mrs
Jupp, she said her heart had been jumping out of its socket and back
again ever since.

I got her into a cab with me, and we went off to the police station. She
talked without ceasing.

"And if the neighbours do say cruel things about me, I'm sure it ain't no
thanks to _him_ if they're true. Mr Pontifex never took a bit o' notice
of me no more than if I had been his sister. Oh, it's enough to make
anyone's back bone curdle. Then I thought perhaps my Rose might get on
better with him, so I set her to dust him and clean him as though I were
busy, and gave her such a beautiful clean new pinny, but he never took no
notice of her no more than he did of me, and she didn't want no
compliment neither, she wouldn't have taken not a shilling from him,
though he had offered it, but he didn't seem to know anything at all. I
can't make out what the young men are a-coming to; I wish the horn may
blow for me and the worms take me this very night, if it's not enough to
make a woman stand before God and strike the one half on 'em silly to see
the way they goes on, and many an honest girl has to go home night after
night without so much as a fourpenny bit and paying three and sixpence a
week rent, and not a shelf nor cupboard in the place and a dead wall in
front of the window.

"It's not Mr Pontifex," she continued, "that's so bad, he's good at
heart. He never says nothing unkind. And then there's his dear eyes--but
when I speak about that to my Rose she calls me an old fool and says I
ought to be poleaxed. It's that Pryer as I can't abide. Oh he! He
likes to wound a woman's feelings he do, and to chuck anything in her
face, he do--he likes to wind a woman up and to wound her down." (Mrs
Jupp pronounced "wound" as though it rhymed to "sound.") "It's a
gentleman's place to soothe a woman, but he, he'd like to tear her hair
out by handfuls. Why, he told me to my face that I was a-getting old;
old indeed! there's not a woman in London knows my age except Mrs Davis
down in the Old Kent Road, and beyond a har