fine histrionic
skill. "I thought as you said seventy-two pounds a month!"

"Oh no, you didn't!" she protested, firmly. "So don't try to tease me. I
never joke about money. Money's a very serious thing."

("Her's a chip o' th' owd block," he told himself, delighted. When he
explained matters to himself, and when he grew angry, he always employed
the Five Towns dialect in its purest form.)

"You must be same as them hospital nurses," he said, aloud. "You do it
because ye like it--for love on it, as they say."

"Like it! I hate it. I hate any sort of work. What fun do you suppose
there is in teaching endless stupid children, and stuffing in classrooms
all day, and correcting exercises and preparing sewing all night? Of
course, they can't help being stupid. It's that that's so amazing. You
can't help being kind to them--they're so stupid."

"If ye didn't do that, what should ye do?" James inquired.

"I shouldn't do anything unless I was forced," said she. "I don't want
to do anything, except enjoy myself--read, play the piano, pay visits,
and have plenty of _really_ nice clothes. Why should I want to do
anything? I can tell you this--if I didn't need the money I'd never go
inside that school again, or any other!"

She was heated.

"Dun ye mean to say," he asked, with an ineffable intonation, "that
Susan and that there young farmer have gone gadding off to Canada and
left you all alone with nothing?"

"Of course they haven't," said Helen. "Why, mother is the most generous
old thing you can possibly imagine. She's left all her own income to
me."

"How much?"

"Well, it comes to rather over thirty shillings a week."

"And can't a single woman live on thirty shillings a _wik_? Bless us! I
don't spend thirty shillings a wik myself."

Helen raised her chin. "A single woman can live on thirty shillings a
week," she said. "But what about her frocks?"

"Well, what about her frocks?" he repeated.

"Well," she said, "I like frocks. It just happens that I can't do
without frocks. It's just frocks that I work for; I spend nearly all I
earn on them." And her eyes, descending, seemed to say: "Look at the
present example."

"Seventy pounds a year on ye clothes! Ye're not serious, lass?"

She looked at him coldly. "I am serious," she said.

Experienced as he was, he had never come across a fact so incredible as
this fact. And the compulsion of believing it occupied his forces to
such an extent that he had no force le