washing and beer. She slaved for her children, and nag-nag-nagged them everlastingly, whether they were in the right or in the wrong, but they were hardened to it and took small notice. She had the spirit of a bullock. Her whole nature was soured. She had those 'worse troubles' which she couldn't tell to anybody, but had to suffer in silence.
She also, in what she called her 'spare time,' put new cuffs and collar-bands on gentlemen's shirts. The gentlemen didn't live in Jones's Alley―they boarded with a patroness of the haggard woman; they didn't know their shirts were done there―had they known it, and known Jones's Alley, one or two of them, who were medical students, might probably have objected. The landlady charged them just twice as much for repairing their shirts as she paid the haggard woman, who, therefore, being unable to buy the cuffs and collar-bands ready-made for sewing on, had no lack of employment with which to fill in her spare time.
Therefore, she was a 'respectable woman,' and was known in Jones's Alley as 'Misses' Aspinall, and called so generally, and even by Mother Brock, who kept 'that place' opposite. There is implied a world of difference between the 'Mother' and the 'Misses,' as applied to matrons in Jones's Alley; and this distinction was about the only thing―always excepting the everlasting 'children'―that the haggard woman had left to care about, to take a selfish, narrow-minded sort of pleasure in―if, indeed, she could yet take pleasure, grim or otherwise, in anything except, perhaps, a good cup of tea and time to drink it in.
