Mrs. Derdon regretted her brooch before she had the door well shut on the two hastening backs. It was a brooch that had come to her at her mother’s death. Her mother had worn it day and night, and used to leave it lying among her hairpins when she went to bed. It had been familiar to the eyes of her long-dead father. Some of her own earliest memories depended on it, and now she had set it adrift. The only thing remaining to her out of the past was the patchwork quilt on the bed above.

It was not the first time she had given in haste like that and regretted it. John’s baptismal shawl, that she had spent long months making, had gone the same way, to a poor woman at the door, and a pair of new gloves of her own, another time. Sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t spent her whole life giving away the things she valued the most, and never getting any thanks for them. There seemed to be no limit to what people would take. She had often said to John that if you gave people an inch they’d take an ell. Hubert, hearing her, remarked that she had only herself to blame since she forced the ell down people’s necks. Hubert then asked John if he could tell him what an ell was, and they both laughed.

Out of all the poor men and women who had come to the door all the years she had been living in the house, there was not one she had ever run across in the street up to the time she met the man with the crooked hand on O’Connell Street bridge, on her way to buy new sheets.