ual in the air of the room, more people and more talking than
usual, and for a moment I was puzzled. Then I bethought me: "This
war with Germany, of course!" A naval battle was supposed to be in
progress in the North Sea. Let them! I returned to the consideration
of my own affairs.

Parload?

Could I go and make it up with him, and then borrow? I weighed the
chances of that. Then I thought of selling or pawning something,
but that seemed difficult. My winter overcoat had not cost a pound
when it was new, my watch was not likely to fetch many shillings.
Still, both these things might be factors. I thought with a certain
repugnance of the little store my mother was probably making for
the rent. She was very secretive about that, and it was locked in
an old tea-caddy in her bedroom. I knew it would be almost impossible
to get any of that money from her willingly, and though I told
myself that in this issue of passion and death no detail mattered,
I could not get rid of tormenting scruples whenever I thought of
that tea-caddy. Was there no other course? Perhaps after every
other source had been tapped I might supplement with a few shillings
frankly begged from her. "These others," I said to myself, thinking
without passion for once of the sons of the Secure, "would find it
difficult to run their romances on a pawnshop basis. However, we
must manage it."

I felt the day was passing on, but I did not get excited about
that. "Slow is swiftest," Parload used to say, and I meant to get
everything thought out completely, to take a long aim and then to
act as a bullet flies.

I hesitated at a pawnshop on my way home to my midday meal, but I
determined not to pledge my watch until I could bring my overcoat
also.

I ate silently, revolving plans.

Section 3

After our midday dinner--it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with
some scraps of cabbage and bacon--I put on my overcoat and got it
out of the house while my mother was in the scullery at the back.

A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as
ours, a damp, unsavory, mainly subterranean region behind the dark
living-room kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty
in our case by the fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning
pit of black uncleanness, opened, and diffused small crunchable
particles about the uneven brick floor. It was the region of
"washing-up," that greasy, damp function that followed every meal;
its atmosphere had ev