been in the remotest degree interested if any one had told her how
numerous the class was. It never occurred to her that any of these
people had homes and it never occurred to her that the whole of the
lower classes lived without any margin at all beyond keeping their homes
together, or that if they stopped working they lost their homes, or that
they looked forward to nothing beyond their working years because there
was nothing beyond their working years for them to look forward to. Nor
would it have interested her in the remotest degree to hear this. The
only fact she knew about the lower classes was that they were
disgustingly extravagant and spent every penny they earned. The woman
across the Green who did her washing had six children and a husband who
was an agricultural labourer and earned eighteen and sixpence a week.
These eight lived in three rooms and "if you please" they actually
bought a gramophone! Mabel instanced it for years after she first heard
it. The idea of that class of person spending money on anything to make
their three rooms lively of an evening was scandalous to Mabel. She
heard of the gramophone outrage in 1908 and she was still instancing it
in 1912. "And those are the people, mind you," she said in 1912, "that
we have to buy these National Insurance stamps for!"

III

Mabel was not demonstrative. She had no enthusiasms and no sympathies.
Enthusiasms and sympathies in other people made her laugh with her
characteristic burst of sudden laughter. It was not, as with some
persons, that matters calling for sympathy made her impatient,--as very
robust people are often intensely impatient with sickness and infirmity.
She never would say, "I have no patience with such and such or so and
so." She had plenty of patience. It was simply that she had no
imagination whatsoever. Whatever she saw or heard or read, she saw or
heard or read exactly as the thing presented itself. If she saw a door
she saw merely a piece of wood with a handle and a keyhole. It may be
argued that a door is merely a piece of wood with a handle and a
keyhole, and that is what Mabel would have argued. But a door is in fact
the most intriguing mystery in the world because of what may be the
other side of it and of what goes on behind it. To Mabel nothing was on
the other side of anything she saw and nothing went on behind it.

A person or a creature in pain was to Mabel a person or a creature "laid
up." Laid up--out of action--n