uld
save her soul alive. Tussie at this time became unable to see a sleek
servant dart to help him take off his coat without saying something
sharp to him, could not sit through a meal without making bitter
comparisons between what they were eating and what the poor were
probably eating, could not walk up his spacious staircase and along
his lofty corridors without scowling; they, indeed, roused his
contemptuous wrath in quite a special degree, the reason being that
Priscilla's stairs, the stairs up and down which her little feet would
have to clamber daily, were like a ladder, and she possessed no
passages at all. But what of that? Priscilla could not see that it
mattered, when Tussie drew her attention to it.

Both Fritzing's and her front door opened straight into their
sitting-rooms; both their staircases walked straight from the kitchens
up into the rooms above. They had meant to have a door knocked in the
dividing wall downstairs, but had been so anxious to get away from
Baker's that there was no time. In order therefore to get to Fritzing
Priscilla would have either to go out into the street and in again at
his front door, or go out at her back door and in again at his. Any
meals, too, she might choose to have served alone would have to be
carried round to her from the kitchen in Fritzing's half, either
through the backyard or through the street.

Tussie thought of this each time he sat at his own meals, surrounded
by deft menials, lapped as he told himself in luxury,--oh, thought
Tussie writhing, it was base. His much-tried mother had to listen to
many a cross and cryptic remark flung across the table from the dear
boy who had always been so gentle; and more than that, he put his
foot down once and for all and refused with a flatness that silenced
her to eat any more patent foods. "Absurd," cried Tussie. "No wonder
I'm such an idiot. Who could be anything else with his stomach full of
starch? Why, I believe the stuff has filled my veins with milk instead
of good honest blood."

"Dearest, I'll have it thrown out of the nearest window," said Lady
Shuttleworth, smiling bravely in her poor Tussie's small cross face.
"But what shall I give you instead? You know you won't eat meat."

"Give me lentils," cried Tussie. "They're cheap."

"Cheap?"

"Mother, I do think it offensive to spend much on what goes into or
onto one's body. Why not have fewer things, and give the rest to the
poor?"

"But I do give the res