He took her coat and folded it over the back of a chair. “That will be safe there,” he said.

He took her hand and led her toward the drawing room as though they were about to dance, like the others. At the entrance he felt her hesitate before the confusion in the room, and he smiled at her to encourage her.

“Come along now, Rose,” he said, “chin up and step together. If we’re not careful, some of these lunatics will trample us under.”

The Poor Men and Women

__________

THE PRIEST’S MOTHER was distracted with herself, wakeful, impenitent, heated in every part by a wearisome discontent that had begun in her spirit very young. She wore herself out cleaning her house, going over her rooms with her dry violent hands, scraping and plucking and picking and rubbing the walls and floors and furniture, and stopping in the middle to clench her fingers tight, tight, tight, but not tight enough, never enough for her, there was no tightness hard and fast enough to satisfy her. Therefore she continued in want.

She was forty-seven, with a gaunt body and a long soft face. Her hair, brown, was done up at the back into a kind of bun or loaf. Her hands were large and hard, like a boy’s. By comparison her husband’s hands seemed small, because although about the same size they were narrower and better shaped, with soft scrubbed tips. He, Hubert, worked in a men’s outfitting shop and wore a hard black hat to work. His mouth, smiling and placid in youth, still smiled, but it had withered and darkened, and he wore no mustache over it.

Every Friday morning he gave her the housekeeping money. She would waylay him as he came down the stairs buttoning his waistcoat, ready to leave for the office, and ask him for the money. She would hurry up the three steps from the kitchen, where the dirty breakfast things were, to catch him on the way out. One morning she closed the kitchen door and waited behind it to see what he would do. He put on his hat and took his umbrella and went out of the house without a pause. She thought he might have left the money on the hall table, but he had not done that, and she had to ask him for it point-blank in the evening. He smiled pleasantly and took it out of an inner pocket where he had it all folded and ready.

“I thought maybe you didn’t need any money this week,” he said. “You weren’t in the hall this morning.”

“I was in the back hanging out the clothes and I mistook the time.”

She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing he had scored. Still, her spite broke out.

“I might have run short,” she cried. “For all you cared there might not have been a penny in the house.”