The dog who did show a proper spirit of humble gratitude and affection towards the cottage and its inhabitants was a dog whom Sophia called Wodge, because she said that was what he looked like.

Wodge was large, grey, woolly and of an amorphous shape. He was also apparently dumb. No one knew where he lived or whom he belonged to, but on sunny mornings when Sophia was sweeping the sitting room floor with the front door open, Wodge would come sauntering past, and would pause at the threshold and look wistfully in. Sophia would call to him encouragingly, and in he would come, with extreme hesitation and diffidence. He would ponderously sit down exactly in the place where Sophia wished to sweep, look about him, and sigh as if in admiration. Then Sophia would pat him; and at first he showed no signs of pleasure, looking at her almost with reproach as though to ask, ‘Why do you waste your caresses on so miserable a thing as myself?’ But gradually his manner would change. First his stumpy tail and then his firm, fat body would begin to agitate, until he was shaking all over with rapture and looking up adoringly at Sophia.

Then, as though reminding himself that violent delights have violent ends, he would slowly get up, shake himself, and saunter soberly away. He resembled a sheepdog more than anything else, but there was also a suggestion of fabulousness about him; so may the Beast have looked to Beauty.

As Harry was to give his sister two pounds a week as soon as ‘The Racket’ was produced, Sophia thought that she would be justified in engaging some daily domestic help.

She accordingly gave her name and address to a domestic agency, humbly stating that she wanted a clean, reliable and honest charwoman (or ‘outworker’, as the agency preferred to call it, with a fine suggestion of banditry and limitless horizons) to come to the cottage for three hours a day at a salary of fifteen shillings a week.

It is certain that Miss Tessitt was clean and honest, but it is surprising how clean and honest a person can be and still be a most confounded nuisance; and as for her reliability, she could be relied upon to be almost as unsatisfactory as a woman is capable of being, and that was all.

But Sophia, who was certainly an ass in many ways, engaged Miss Tessitt because she was sorry for her, and because she was afraid, after asking one or two questions of her, to say ‘Miss Tessitt, you will not suit.’ It did not occur to her to say, ‘I will let you know,’ and then do nothing more about it.

Miss Tessitt called upon Sophia one evening when the boys were out. She arrived panting, and her first remark to Sophia was that It Was A Climb. She added that her heart was weak, and that she was not very strong. She did not look it. Her face had the fixed, red, transparent colour of those whose hearts are weak, and she was too thin. She was neatly, if bittily, dressed and her whole person breathed a dried, prim, cooing spinsterishness which was emphasized by her thin, prunes-and-prisms voice. She pushed her sentences through a tiny pursed-up mouth shaped like an O, while her round light eyes stared at Sophia indignantly through rimless glasses.