ombed out their
hair properly; and Tony's and my breakfasts are cooking; and the kettle
is boiling out or over; and Tony is asking her where he has left his
other guernsey, and everybody is talking nineteen to the dozen--and she
wants her own breakfast too. It is at such a moment that she displays
best her most characteristic gesture.

Most people who work with a will, possess some gesture or movement
which is typical of, and sums up, the major part of their
activities--the gesture that sculptors and painters try to catch. To
lay out on home and family the earnings of a workman who is regularly
paid, calls for skill and care enough on the part of a wife who has no
reserve fund and must make the weekly accounts balance to within a few
ha'pence. But successfully to lay out, and to lay by, the earnings of a
man like Tony, whose family is large and whose money comes in with
extreme irregularity, requires a combination of forethought and
self-control which falls little short of genius. And it has to be done
on a cash basis, for debt would worry Tony out of his wits. The family
purse must necessarily be the centre, and the symbol, of Mrs Widger's
household activities; a matter to which she must give more thought than
to any other one thing.

"Mabel, I want you to go out for me," she says. "Get me my purse."

[Sidenote: _CHARACTERISTIC GESTURE_]

Standing, as a rule, by the dresser, she receives the purse into her
hand, opens it meditatively, looks in, pokes a ringer in, tips the
purse and peers between the coins as they fall apart; takes one or two
out and replaces them as if they fitted into slots. Then with a
wide-armed gesture, curiously commanding and graceful, she hands out to
the child perhaps a ha'penny. "Get me a ha'porth o' new milk, quick!"

The purse is put away.

So striking is the little ceremony, so symbolic, so able to stop our
chatter while we look, that we have nicknamed Mam Widger _The Purse
Bearer_.

That is the name for her--Purse Bearer.

17

Downstairs in the front room there are two or three photographs of
George, that he himself has sent home since that day he went off to the
Navy. The earliest shows him still boyish, sitting small, as it were,
and a little shy of his new uniform. In the latest, taken not long ago,
nor very long in point of time after the first, he is sitting bolt
upright, chest inflated, arms akimbo with a straight, level, almost
ferocious look in his eyes. He has appare