as
disappearing. Today it was washing, ironing tomorrow, next day baking,
after that scrubbing--thus on and on. We would occasionally see a
neighbour or a tea-agent, a tramp or an Assyrian hawker. By hard slogging
against flood, fire, drought, pests, stock diseases, and the sweating
occasioned by importation, we could manage to keep bread in our mouths.
By training and education I was fitted for nought but what I was, or a
general slavey, which was many degrees worse. I could take my choice.
Life was too much for me. What was the end of it, what its meaning, aim,
hope, or use?

In comparison to millions I knew that I had received more than a fair
share of the goods of life; but knowing another has leprosy makes our
cancer none the easier to bear.

My mother's voice, sharp and cross, roused me. "Sybylla, you lazy
unprincipled girl, to sit scheming there while your poor old mother is at
the wash-tub. You sit idling there, and then by and by you'll be groaning
about this terrible life in which there's time for nothing but work."

How she fussed and bothered over the clothes was a marvel to me. My frame
of mind was such that it seemed it would not signify if all our clothes
went to the dogs, and the clothes of our neighbours, and the clothes of
the whole world, and the world itself for the matter of that.

"Sybylla, you are a dirty careless washer. You've put Stanley's trousers
in the boil and the colour is coming out of them, and your father's best
white handkerchief should have been with the first lot, and here it is
now."

Poor mother got crosser as she grew weary with the fierce heat and
arduous toil, and as I in my abstraction continued to make mistakes, but
the last straw was the breaking of an old cup which I accidentally pushed
off the table.

I got it hot. Had I committed an act of premeditated villainy I could not
have received more lecturing. I deserved it--I was careless, cups were
scarce with us, and we could not afford more; but what I rail against is
the grindingly uneventful narrowness of the life in which the
unintentional breaking of a common cup is good for a long scolding.

Ah, my mother! In my life of nineteen years I can look back and see a
time when she was all gentleness and refinement, but the polish has been
worn off it by years and years of scrubbing and scratching, and washing
and patching, and poverty and husbandly neglect, and the bearing of
burdens too heavy for delicate shoulders. Wou