WORK IN LONDON
use the carving knife to them; she had a sister a flower hand, making artificial flowers, who had "fallen".
Those were her ideals. If you translate them into terms of greater material prosperity you find them identical with anyone else's. One desires for the later years of one's life a little ease. She would have it when the law permitted her children to aid her. One desires privacy when one suffers, she would have it if the enquiry blokes would keep away. One desires that one's children should grow in virtue.
I should say that she was as contented and as cheerful as myself; she probably knew better than people more enlightened and with higher ambitions, the truth of the saying that was constantly on her lips, "We can't b . . . well all have everything." And, as I have said, to be in her presence was to find all "problems". Police court missionaries, societies, and sisters of the poor grow dim and childish along with the Modern Spirit itself. It was like interviewing the bedrock of human existence in a cavern deep in the earth. "Influences" on the surface, busy about raising her seemed to become mere whispers a long way above. She supported them all.
As you went upstairs to her room you were presented with an astonishing picture. (I was at the time looking for an investment, and this house had been offered to me as producing a highly desirable rental.) It had once been a model dwelling; the stairs were of stone, but the railings, the banisters, the panels of nearly all the doors, and sometimes the very doorposts, every
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