she was a very nice willing girl, and she would have liked to keep her herself only her husband, who had something to do with ships, had been out of work for six months and was ill in bed with sciatica, so that they could not afford it. She told me all about herself and called her five children in for me to see. They stood in a row and all recited little pieces that they had learned at school, all except one who was deaf and dumb, and he showed me a castle and cliffs that he had made out of bits of broken oyster-shells. It was all most frightfully interesting and I gave them threepenny-bits each, and they seemed so pleased and showed each other their threepenny-bits all round, though of course they were all alike. Mrs. Plack said that Cement Street was a very nice street for those parts, and, although they were rather unfortunate just then, that she was much better off than most of the people around because she had rich relations—a brother, I think, who kept a public-house. Before I left she showed me three electro-plated serviette rings which she kept in a cupboard to be ready when her rich relations came to see her. She had been married fourteen years and they had not been yet, but, she said, it was a satisfaction to have things nice in case they ever did come."
It was some twenty-four hours later that the doings of Marianna again moved Mrs. Bartlett's utterance, but this time in a different key.
"It is perfectly too bad," she exclaimed, coming into the little drawing-room where her husband was reading. "I have just been into Marianna's room to see that she was keeping it tidy, and I find that she has scribbled all over the wall with match-ends and pencils. You know, Tom, it is a pretty, light blue distemper and you can guess what it is like now. And here is a nice book that I lent her to read: she has had the—well, it isn't really impertinence because she simply doesn't know any
