the mere
sense of helplessness, fill slowly with tears, until Emmy, smothering
her own rough sympathy, would dab Pa's eyes with a harsh handkerchief
and would rebuke him for his decay. Those were hard moments in the
Blanchard home, for the two girls had grown almost manlike in abhorrence
of tears, and with this masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding
feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share.
It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog,
unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness
something that they could only give by means of pats and half-bullying
kindness. At such times it was Jenny who left her place at the table and
popped a morsel of food into Pa's mouth; but it was Emmy who best
understood the bitterness of his soul. It was Emmy, therefore, who would
snap at her sister and bid her get on with her own food; while Pa
Blanchard made trembling scrapes with his knife and fork until the mood
passed. But then it was Emmy who was most with Pa; it was Emmy who hated
him in the middle of her love because he stood to her as the living
symbol of her daily inescapable servitude in this household. Jenny
could never have felt that she would like to kill Pa. Emmy sometimes
felt that. She at times, when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook
with hysterical anger, born of the inevitable days in his society and in
the kitchen, that she could have thrown at him the battered pot which
she carried, or could have pushed him passionately against the
mantelpiece in her fierce hatred of his helplessness and his occasional
perverse stupidity. He was rarely stupid with Jenny, but giggled at her
teasing.

Jenny was taller than Emmy by several inches. She was tall and thin and
dark, with an air of something like impudent bravado that made her
expression sometimes a little wicked. Her nose was long and straight,
almost sharp-pointed; her face too thin to be a perfect oval. Her eyes
were wide open, and so full of power to show feeling that they seemed
constantly alive with changing and mocking lights and shadows. If she
had been stouter the excellent shape of her body, now almost too thick
in the waist, would have been emphasised. Happiness and comfort, a
decrease in physical as in mental restlessness, would have made her more
than ordinarily beautiful. As it was she drew the eye at once, as though
she challenged a conflict of will: and her movements wer