ily. One of the
younger children was a classmate.

"They live on Jordan Street in a house, and Laura has roller skates. I
don't see why I can't."

This was one of the occasions on which Hannah had given vent to her
indignation. Lise was fourteen. Her open rebellion was less annoying than
Janet's silent reproach, but at least she had something to take hold of.

"Well, Lise," she said, shifting the saucepan to another part of the
stove, "I guess if your father and I had put both you girls in the mills
and crowded into one room and cooked in a corner, and lived on onions and
macaroni, and put four boarders each in the other rooms, I guess we could
have had a house, too. We can start in right now, if you're willing."

But Lise had only looked darker.

"I don't see why father can't make money--other men do."

"Isn't he working as hard as he can to send you to school, and give you a
chance?"

"I don't want that kind of a chance. There's Sadie Howard at school--she
don't have to work. She liked me before she found out where I lived..."

There was an element of selfishness in Hannah's mania for keeping busy,
for doing all their housework and cooking herself. She could not bear to
have her daughters interfere; perhaps she did not want to give herself
time to think. Her affection for Edward, such as it was, her loyalty to
him, was the logical result of a conviction ingrained in early youth that
marriage was an indissoluble bond; a point of views once having a
religious sanction, no less powerful now that--all unconsciously--it had
deteriorated into a superstition. Hannah, being a fatalist, was not
religious. The beliefs of other days, when she had donned her best dress
and gone to church on Sundays, had simply lapsed and left--habits. No new
beliefs had taken their place....

Even after Janet and Lise had gone to work the household never seemed to
gain that margin of safety for which Hannah yearned. Always, when they
were on the verge of putting something by, some untoward need or accident
seemed to arise on purpose to swallow it up: Edward, for instance, had
been forced to buy a new overcoat, the linoleum on the dining-room floor
must be renewed, and Lise had had a spell of sickness, losing her
position in a flower shop. Afterwards, when she became a saleslady in the
Bagatelle, that flamboyant department store in Faber Street, she earned
four dollars and a half a week. Two of these were supposed to go into the
common f