he duster
and her work was done; but here the least speck of dust showed on the
polished surface. Jonah, too, had got into a nasty habit of writing
insulting words on the dusty surface with his finger.

Well, let him! There had been endless trouble since he bought the
piano. As sure as Miss Grimes came to give Ray his lesson, he declared
the place was a pigsty and tried to shame her by taking off his coat
and dusting the room himself. Not that she blamed Miss Grimes. She
was quite a lady in her way, and had won Ada's heart by telling her
that she hated housework. She thought Ada must be a born housekeeper to
do without a servant, and Ada didn't trouble to put her right. Anyhow,
Jonah should keep a servant. He pretended that their servants in
Wyndham Street had made game of her behind her back, and robbed her
right and left. What did that matter? she thought--Jonah could afford
it.

The real reason was that he wanted no one in the house to see how he
treated his wife. She cared little herself whether she had a girl or
not, for she had always been accustomed to make work easy by neglecting
it. If Jonah wanted a floor that you could eat your dinner off, let him
get a servant. He was as mean as dirt. A fat lot she got out of his
money. Here she was, shut up in these rooms, little better than a
prisoner, for her old pals never dared show their noses in this house,
and she could never go out without all the shop-hands knowing it. She
never bought a new dress, but Jonah stormed like a madman, declaring
that she looked like a servant dressed up. Well, her clothes knocked
Cardigan Street endways when she paid her mother a visit, and that was
all she wanted.

There was her mother, too. She had never been a real mother to her;
you could never tell what she was thinking about. Other people took
their troubles to her, but she treated her own daughter like a
stranger. And, of course, she sided with Jonah and talked till her jaw
ached about her duty to her child and her husband. She would have
married Tom Mullins if it hadn't been for the kid, and lived in
Cardigan Street like her pals. Her thoughts travelled back to Packard's
and the Road. She remembered with intense longing the group at the
corner, the drunken rows, and the nightly gossip on the doorstep. That
was life for her. She had been like a fish out of water ever since she
left it. She thought with singular bitterness of Jonah's attempts to
introduce he