a simpleton,
but I'm not such a simpleton as he thinks for, nor as some other folks
think for, either!" (At this point Hilda had to admit that in truth her
mother was not completely a simpleton. In her mother was a vein of
perceptive shrewdness that occasionally cropped out and made all Hilda's
critical philosophy seem school-girlish.) "Do you think I don't know
George Cannon? He came here o' purpose to get that rent-collecting.
Well, he's got it, and he's welcome to it, for I doubt not he'll do it a
sight better than poor Mr. Skellorn! But he needn't hug himself that
he's been too clever for me, because he hasn't. I gave him the
rent-collecting because I thought I would!... Buy! He's no more got a
good customer for Calder Street than he's got a good customer for this
slop-bowl!"

Hilda resented this casual detraction of a being who had so deeply
impressed her. And moreover she was convinced that her mother, secretly
very flattered and delighted by the visit, was adopting a derisive
attitude in order to 'show off' before her daughter. Parents are thus
ingenuous! But she was so shocked and sneaped that she found it more
convenient to say nothing.

"George Cannon could talk the hind leg off a horse," Mrs. Lessways
continued quite happily. "And yet it isn't as if he said a great deal.
He doesn't. I'll say this for him. He's always the gentleman. And I
couldn't say as much for his sister being a lady, and I'm sorry for it.
He's the most gentlemanly man in Turnhill, and always so spruce, too!"

"His sister?"

"Well, his half-sister, since you're so particular, Miss Precise!"

"Not Miss Gailey?" said Hilda, who began faintly to recall a forgotten
fact of which she thought she had once been cognizant.

"Yes, Miss Gailey," Mrs. Lessways snapped, still very genial and
content. "I did hear she's quarrelled out and out with _him_, too, at
last!" She tightened her lips. "Draw the blind down."

Miss Gailey, a spinster of superior breeding and a teacher of dancing,
had in the distant past been an intimate friend of Mrs. Lessways. The
friendship was legendary in the house, and the grand quarrel which had
finally put an end to it dated in Hilda's early memories like a
historical event. For many years the two had not exchanged a word.

Mrs. Lessways lit the gas, and the china and the white cloth and the
coloured fruit-jelly and the silver spoons caught the light and threw it
off again, with gaiety.

"Has she swept the hearth