But on Saturdays it would be different, for on Saturdays her man would not return until he was compelled by the closing of his public-house. On these evenings her heart would begin to beat at eight o’clock, and it would go on beating louder and louder as the hours went by, till, as she would have expressed it, she felt “fit to drop.” And yet, all those hours, while her sons were sleeping, there was at work a strange poison in her soul, a dull fever of revolt, in preparation for the blows that would be given her if he came in drunk--a sort of perverse spirit, vouchsafed by Providence, bringing those blows nearer, almost inviting them, yet keeping her alive beneath them. At the midnight striking of the nearest clock her heart would give a sickening leap under the malodorous and blackened quilt, and she would lie, trying to pretend to sleep. So old was that device, so useless--yet she never gave it up, for her brain was not a fertile one. Soon after would begin his footsteps, slow, wavering, coming up and up, with pauses, with mutterings, with now and then a heavy stumble. Her breath would come in gasps, and her eyes, just opening, would glue themselves to where the door showed dimly by the sputtering candlelight. Slowly that door would open, and he would enter. Through her slits of eyes she would look at him as he stood swaying there. And suddenly the angry thought that there he was--the sot that had drunken up her earnings and his own--would give her a dull buzzing in her head; and all fear left her. Not though he might tear away the blackened quilt, pull her out of bed, and shower blows, was there anything within her but a dull, shrill, waspish anger, shooting from her tongue and eyes. Only when he had finished, and rolled on to the bed to sleep like a dead man, did she feel the pains that he had given her. Then, dragging her feet slowly, she would creep back beneath the quilt, and cover up her face. But some Saturdays he would come back before the clock had struck twelve; and, standing by the door, with the light falling on his face, would look at her, swaying but slightly with his lower lip hanging very loose. Over his face, as he stood there, would spread a leering smile, and he would call her by her name. Then in her dingy bed she would know that she still had work to do. And with no smile on her tired face, no joy in her thin body, no thought of anything in her starved brain, not even of the countless children she had borne in her dim alleys to this half-drunken man, nor of the countless children she had still to bear--she would lie waiting. COMFORT XVI COMFORT