"I mean Dorah! She said you were wasting the old man to a shadow and she was going to put a stop to it, for father's sake and everybody else's!" "Wasting to a shadow! What about mother?" "I know! But I didn't say anything! You know what it's like to argue with Dorah! But she was going to see father about it, sooner or later, and now that this has happened ... well, we'd best go and see her at once!" "Not one word didst thou say to me!" complained Mrs. Massel. "It's bad enough now we've got to; what dost thou want more, _mutter_?" "Oh, but what are you driving at, Channah? What's the idea?" "She's going to put up a bed for you in her back-room. Benjamin keeps a lot of stock there now, but they can put a little under your bed and the rest on the landing. You can pay her so much a week while your scholarship lasts, and if you don't get another, well, she says you'll just have to go in for tailoring or something; or Benjamin can take you on his rounds." "Oh, hell!" groaned Philip. There had never been much sympathy between his elder sister Dorah and himself. Although the fact was rarely referred to among the Massels, Reb Monash and his wife were already a widower and a widow respectively when they were married, Reb Monash bringing Dorah, and Mrs. Massel Channah, to the union. Their only children were Rochke, who died so tragically on the exodus of the family from Russia, and Philip, born some time later in Doomington. The common parent between Dorah and Philip, therefore, was Reb Monash, and the long conflict between the father and son had rendered less and less substantial the affection between the brother and sister. Dorah, a tall, squared-jawed angular woman, was in some ways more masculine and more forbidding than Reb Monash, and in all ways more evident to the eye in her Longton household than her demure husband, Benjamin, whose main concerns in life were his wife's temper and the state of his samples. From time to time she had startled Philip with sudden spurts of generosity, but these had become increasingly rarer during the last two years. "There's no way out of it!" asserted Channah. "And, after all, mother, it's only twenty minutes' walk away. Besides, there's the tram up Blenheim Road!" The three made their appearance before long at Dorah's. They found her already in possession of the main facts, as she had sent Benjamin down that morning to find out how the family was feeling after the fast and Benjamin had met Reb Monash proceeding to Longton. They had both accepted the hospitality and the lemon-tea of Mr. Levine, the _parnass_, who had ushered them in from the door of his furniture shop. Benjamin had rendered his report duly. With Channah, Dorah was monosyllabic. Philip she ignored. "From where he takes this godlessness, _mutter_," she said in Yiddish, "I understand not! A _shkandal_ it is, over the whole neighbourhood!"