It was a shame, what happened, all their plans gone for nothing. By that time they were all out working — Polly in the knitting factory, Clare in the news agent’s, Martin in the county surveyor’s office, and Min in the dressmaking business. She was a dressmaker from the beginning, through no choice of her own, and she made a good job of it. Everybody said she was very reliable and that she had good style. As soon as she could manage it she moved the sewing machine out of her mother’s front parlor and into the rooms on the Main Street, where she now lived. One way and another, she had had a title to these rooms for almost sixty years. The house changed owners, but Min remained on. She had no intention of giving up her flat, especially since her rent included the three little atticky rooms on the third floor, the top floor of the house. She showed great foresight when she had those top-floor rooms included in her original arrangement, all those many years ago. Now she had made the top floor into a little flat, makeshift but very nice. She found young couples liked it for the first years or so of their married lives. And she still had the lease of the little house at the corner of Georges Street and Oliver Plunkett Street, where her mother had taken them all to live when they were still babies. That little house Min had turned, in her informal way, into two flats, and she had the rent from them. And she had her old-age pension, and something in the bank — nobody knew how much, although there were many guesses. Some said she was too clever, too sharp altogether. The butcher downstairs under her flat hated her. She didn’t care. She had the last laugh. He could stand in the doorway of his shop and watch her coming up the street, and give her all the black looks he liked — she didn’t care. She couldn’t help laughing when she thought of how sure he was when he bought the house that he would be able to get rid of her simply by telling her she wasn’t wanted, and that he needed the whole house for his growing family. She wasn’t going to die to suit him and she didn’t care whether he wanted her or not. It was presumptuous of him to imagine she would care whether he wanted her there or didn’t want her there. He even had the impertinence to tell her that he and his wife had the greatest respect for her. Min didn’t know the wife but she knew the people the wife came from. No need to see people of that class to know what they were, and what their “respect” was worth. She told the butcher to his face that he might as well leave her alone. She wasn’t going to budge. Of course, it would be very nice and convenient for him only to have to walk upstairs to his tea at night after he shut up the shop, but he was going to have to wait for his convenience. A narrow gate alongside his shop entrance led into a covered passage, and there was her downstairs front door at the side of the house, as private as you please. She was very well off there. The place was nicely fixed up. She liked being there in the flat alone, with the downstairs door locked and the door of her flat locked and the fire going and the electric reading lamp at her shoulder and an interesting book to read and the day’s paper to hand, in case she felt like going over it again. And she had Delia’s little footstool to keep her feet off the floor. She thought it was like a miracle the way things had evened out in the end. She had gone around and around and up and down for all those years, doing her duty and observing the rules of life as far as she knew them, and her feet had stopped walking on the exact spot where her road ended — here in this room, with everything gathered around her, and everything in its right place. Her mother had always said that Min was the one who would keep the flag flying no matter what. Min had never in her life been content to sit down and do nothing, but now she was quite content to sit idle. What she saw about her in the room was a job well done. She had not known until now that a job well done creates an eminence that you can rest on.