Most people who work with a will, possess some gesture or movement which is typical of, and sums up, the major part of their activities--the gesture that sculptors and painters try to catch. To lay out on home and family the earnings of a workman who is regularly paid, calls for skill and care enough on the part of a wife who has no reserve fund and must make the weekly accounts balance to within a few ha'pence. But successfully to lay out, and to lay by, the earnings of a man like Tony, whose family is large and whose money comes in with extreme irregularity, requires a combination of forethought and self-control which falls little short of genius. And it has to be done on a cash basis, for debt would worry Tony out of his wits. The family purse must necessarily be the centre, and the symbol, of Mrs Widger's household activities; a matter to which she must give more thought than to any other one thing. "Mabel, I want you to go out for me," she says. "Get me my purse." [Sidenote: _CHARACTERISTIC GESTURE_] Standing, as a rule, by the dresser, she receives the purse into her hand, opens it meditatively, looks in, pokes a ringer in, tips the purse and peers between the coins as they fall apart; takes one or two out and replaces them as if they fitted into slots. Then with a wide-armed gesture, curiously commanding and graceful, she hands out to the child perhaps a ha'penny. "Get me a ha'porth o' new milk, quick!" The purse is put away. So striking is the little ceremony, so symbolic, so able to stop our chatter while we look, that we have nicknamed Mam Widger _The Purse Bearer_. That is the name for her--Purse Bearer. 17 Downstairs in the front room there are two or three photographs of George, that he himself has sent home since that day he went off to the Navy. The earliest shows him still boyish, sitting small, as it were, and a little shy of his new uniform. In the latest, taken not long ago, nor very long in point of time after the first, he is sitting bolt upright, chest inflated, arms akimbo with a straight, level, almost ferocious look in his eyes. He has apparently taken a measure of the world outside Under Town, and is all the surer of his feet for having stood up against greater odds and for having walked the slippery plank of Navy regulations. "If you'm minded to run up against me," he seems to be saying, "come and try; here I am." The two photographs suggest the difference between a bird in winter and in the mating season. George's uniform, in the later photograph, has become his spring plumage. [Sidenote: _GEORGE HOME_] When he sent word that he was coming home on leave, I was prepared for a great change in him, but scarcely for the new George. He used to be so like a cat on a sunny wall; used to lie along the stern seat of the _Moondaisy_ so lazy and content that only his ever-watchful eyes held any expression. He was deeply sunburnt: scraggy in the neck; strong and lissome, but not very smart.