n the newspapers. But till now we had never come across an
example. The woman in question belonged to a bad type. Various dregs
from large cities drift into the mills around little country towns and
are the despair of Mayors, curates, and other local authorities. We
genteel folk regarded them as a plague-spot in the midst of us.

I remember the scandal when the troops first came in August, 1914, to
Wellingsford--a scandal put a summary end to, after a fortnight's
grinning amazement at our country morals, by the troops themselves.
Tufton had married into an undesirable community.

"We're wasting time," said Betty.

So Marigold put me into the back of the car and mounted into the front
seat by Betty, and we started.

Flowery End was the poetic name of the mean little row of red-brick
houses inhabited exclusively by Mrs. Tufton and her colleagues at the
mills. To get to it you turn off the High Street by the Post Office,
turn to the right down Avonmore Avenue, and then to the left. There you
find Flowery End, and, fifty yards further on, the main road to Godbury
crosses it at right angles. Betty, who lived on the Godbury Road, was
quite familiar with Flowery End. Mid-June did its best to justify the
name. Here and there, in the tiny patches of front garden, a tenant
tried to help mid-June by cultivating wall-flowers and geraniums and
snapdragon and a rose or two; but the majority cared as much for the
beauty of mid-June as for the cleanliness of their children,--an
unsightly brood, with any slovenly rags about their bodies, and the
circular crust of last week's treacle on their cheeks. In his
abominable speeches before the war Gedge used to point out these
children to unsympathetic Wellingsfordians as the Infant Martyrs of an
Accursed Capitalism.

Betty pulled up the car at Number Seven. Marigold sprang out, helped
her down, and would have walked up the narrow flagged path to knock at
the door. But she declined his aid, and he stood sentry by the gap
where the wicket gate of the garden should have been. I saw the door
open on Betty's summons, and a brawny, tousled, red-faced woman
appear--a most horrible and forbidding female, although bearing traces
of a once blowsy beauty. As in most cottages hereabouts, you entered
straight from garden-plot into the principal livingroom. On each side
of the two figures I obtained a glimpse of stark emptiness.

Betty said: "Are you Mrs. Tufton? I've come to talk to you about your