an irritation, but a flicker of
austerity. "You must remember we've a great many things to think about.
There are things we must take for granted in each other--we must all
help in our way to pull the coach. That's what I mean by worry, and if
you don't have any so much the better for you. For me it's in the day's
work. Your father and I have most to think about always at this time, as
you perfectly know--when we have to turn things round and manage somehow
or other to get out of town, have to provide and pinch, to meet all the
necessities, with money, money, money at every turn running away like
water. The children this year seem to fit into nothing, into nowhere,
and Harold's more dreadful than he has ever been, doing nothing at all
for himself and requiring everything to be done for him. He talks about
his American girl, with millions, who's so awfully taken with him, but
I can't find out anything about her: the only one, just now, that people
seem to have heard of is the one Booby Manger's engaged to. The Mangers
literally snap up everything," Mrs. Brook quite wailingly now continued:
"the Jew man, so gigantically rich--who is he? Baron Schack or
Schmack--who has just taken Cumberland House and who has the awful
stammer--or what is it? no roof to his mouth--is to give that horrid
little Algie, to do his conversation for him, four hundred a year, which
Harold pretended to me that, of all the rush of young men--dozens!--HE
was most in the running for. Your father's settled gloom is terrible,
and I bear all the brunt of it; we get literally nothing this year for
the Hovel, yet have to spend on it heaven knows what; and everybody, for
the next three months, in Scotland and everywhere, has asked us for the
wrong time and nobody for the right: so that I assure you I don't know
where to turn--which doesn't however in the least prevent every one
coming to me with their own selfish troubles." It was as if Mrs. Brook
had found the cup of her secret sorrows suddenly jostled by some touch
of which the perversity, though not completely noted at the moment,
proved, as she a little let herself go, sufficient to make it flow over;
but she drew, the next thing, from her daughter's stillness a reflexion
of the vanity of such heat and speedily recovered herself as if in order
with more dignity to point the moral. "I can carry my burden and shall
do so to the end; but we must each remember that we shall fall to pieces
if we don't manage