Her cleanliness in housewifery was
distracting to behold. She met Simmons at the front door whenever
he came home, and then and there he changed his boots for slippers,
balancing himself painfully on alternate feet on the cold flags. This
was because she scrubbed the passage and door-step turn about with the
wife of the downstairs family, and because the stair-carpet was her
own. She vigilantly supervised her husband all through the process of
"cleaning himself" after work, so as to come between her walls and the
possibility of random splashes; and if, in spite of her diligence, a
spot remained to tell the tale, she was at pains to impress the fact on
Simmons's memory, and to set forth at length all the circumstances of
his ungrateful selfishness. In the beginning she had always escorted
him to the ready-made clothes shop, and had selected and paid for his
clothes, for the reason that men are such perfect fools, and shopkeepers
do as they like with them. But she presently improved on that. She found
a man selling cheap remnants at a street-corner, and straightway she
conceived the idea of making Simmons's clothes herself. Decision was
one of her virtues, and a suit of uproarious check tweeds was begun
that afternoon from the pattern furnished by an old one. More: it was
finished by Sunday, when Simmons, overcome by astonishment at the feat,
was endued in it, and pushed off to chapel ere he could recover his
senses. The things were not altogether comfortable, he found: the
trousers hung tight against his shins, but hung loose behind his heels;
and when he sat, it was on a wilderness of hard folds and seams.
Also, his waistcoat collar tickled his nape, but his coat collar went
straining across from shoulder to shoulder; while the main garment
bagged generously below his waist. Use made a habit of his discomfort,
but it never reconciled him to the chaff of his shopmates; for, as Mrs.
Simmons elaborated successive suits, each one modelled on the last, the
primal accidents of her design developed into principles, and grew
even bolder and more hideously pronounced. It was vain for Simmons to
hint--as hint he did--that he shouldn't like her to overwork herself,
tailoring being bad for the eyes, and there was a new tailor's in the
Mile End Road, very cheap, where . . . "Ho yus," she retorted, "you're
very consid'rit I dessay sittin' there actin' a livin' lie before your
own wife Thomas Simmons as though I couldn't see through yo