"
Jane bowed her head again and picked at the fringe of the
mantel-covering--a foolish thing that she herself had embroidered and
draped. Now, for the first time, she formulated her mother. "I've half
known it all along," she thought, "and now I know it for sure." In this
moment she definitely saw her mother, not as a creature of the
affections, but as a creature of, mere habit. "And it's been so for the
last twenty years," thought the poor girl.
Eliza Marshall passed back to one of the candelabra; its cracked prisms
tinkled as her broken talk went on. "Well, I don't know, I'm sure. Our
last neighbors are leaving us. Business and boarding-houses all around.
And Rosy wants to change. And there's so much noise and dirt, and so many
peddlers and beggars. And--and--" She was thinking of Susan Bates's
library, but would not permit herself a spoken reference to it. "And
so much work to keep things tidy. And those miserable fellows breaking
into our barn. I don't know, I'm sure."
Marshall himself, meanwhile, talked the matter over with Belden and with
Roger, when Roger came in to consider the assault on the stable and the
policy of employing the police. "I don't know that I should depend too
much on the city's detectives," he had observed; "but I will have them go
down to the house, if you say."
Accordingly, one morning a brace of young Irishmen modestly traversed the
sidewalk which led around the house, and knocked with some show of
decorum at the kitchen door.
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