The governesses, charged with life for another twenty-four hours at
least, flocked down the creaking stairs. They nodded as they passed
the Bureau window where the Postmaster pored over his collection of
stamps, or examined a fretwork pattern of a boy on a bicycle--there
was no heavy garden work that day--and went out into the street. They
stood in knots a moment, discussing unfavourably the food just eaten,
and declaring they would stand it no longer. 'Only where else can we
go?' said one, feeling automatically at her velvet bag to make sure
the orange was safely in it. Upstairs, at the open window, Madame
Jequier overheard them as she filled the walnut shells with butter for
the birds. She only smiled.
'I wish we could help her,' Mother was saying to her husband, as they
watched her from the sofa in the room behind. 'A more generous
creature never lived.' It was a daily statement that lacked force
owing to repetition, yet the emotion prompting it was ever new and
real.
'Or a more feckless,' was his reply. 'But if we ever come into our
estates, we will. It shall be the first thing.' His mind always
hovered after those distant estates when it was perplexed by immediate
financial difficulty, and just now he was thinking of various bills
and payments falling due. It was his own sympathetic link with the
widow--ways and means, and the remorseless nature of sheets of paper
with columns of figures underneath the horrible word _doit.
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