Lise had
returned from school, dark and mutinous, with a tale of such a family.
One of the younger children was a classmate.

"They live on Jordan Street in a house, and Laura has roller skates. I
don't see why I can't."

This was one of the occasions on which Hannah had given vent to her
indignation. Lise was fourteen. Her open rebellion was less annoying
than Janet's silent reproach, but at least she had something to take
hold of.

"Well, Lise," she said, shifting the saucepan to another part of the
stove, "I guess if your father and I had put both you girls in the mills
and crowded into one room and cooked in a corner, and lived on onions
and macaroni, and put four boarders each in the other rooms, I guess
we could have had a house, too. We can start in right now, if you're
willing."

But Lise had only looked darker.

"I don't see why father can't make money--other men do."

"Isn't he working as hard as he can to send you to school, and give you
a chance?"

"I don't want that kind of a chance. There's Sadie Howard at school--she
don't have to work. She liked me before she found out where I lived..."

There was an element of selfishness in Hannah's mania for keeping busy,
for doing all their housework and cooking herself. She could not bear to
have her daughters interfere; perhaps she did not want to give herself
time to think. Her affection for Edward, such as it was, her loyalty
to him, was the logical result of a conviction ingrained in early youth
that marriage was an indissoluble bond; a point of views once having a
religious sanction, no less powerful now that--all unconsciously--it
had deteriorated into a superstition. Hannah, being a fatalist, was not
religious. The beliefs of other days, when she had donned her best dress
and gone to church on Sundays, had simply lapsed and left--habits. No
new beliefs had taken their place....

Even after Janet and Lise had gone to work the household never seemed to
gain that margin of safety for which Hannah yearned. Always, when
they were on the verge of putting something by, some untoward need
or accident seemed to arise on purpose to swallow it up: Edward, for
instance, had been forced to buy a new overcoat, the linoleum on the
dining-room floor must be renewed, and Lise had had a spell of sickness,
losing her position in a flower shop. Afterwards, when she became a
saleslady in the Bagatelle, that flamboyant department store in Faber
Street, she earned four