"P.S.--Don't try to find me at the factory. I have left." Salvina steadied herself against the mantelpiece till the room should have finished reeling round. _Get!_ Her father had wanted to put away her mother! Divorce, departure, devastation--what strange things were these, come to wreck a prosperity so slowly built up! "Quick, Salvina, there goes a policeman!" came her mother's cry. The room stood still suddenly. "Hush, hush, mother," Salvina said imperiously. "There's no thief!" She ran back into the passage, the letter in her hand. A fierce flame of intelligence leapt into the woman's face. "Ah, it's your father!" she cried. "I knew it, I knew he'd go after that painted widow, just because she has a little money, a black curse on her bones. Oh! oh! God in heaven! To bring such shame on me, for the sake of a saucy-nosed slut whose sister sold ironmongery in Petticoat Lane--a low lot, one and all, and not fit to wipe my shoes on, even when she was respectable, and this is what you call a father, Salvina! Oh my God, my God!" Salvina was by this time dazed, yet she had a gleam of consciousness left with which to register this culminating destruction of all her social landmarks. What! That monstrous wickedness of marquises and epauletted officers which hovered vaguely in the shadow-land of novels and plays had tumbled with a bang into real life; had fallen not even into its natural gilded atmosphere, but through the amulet-guarded doors of a respectable Jewish family in the heart of a Hackney Terrace, amid the horsehair couches and deal tables of homely reality. Nay--more sordid than the romantic wickedness of shadowland--it had even removed those couches and tables! And oddly blent with this tossing chaos of new thought in Salvina's romantic brain surged up another thought, no less new and startling. Her father and mother had once loved each other! They, too, had dawned upon each other, fairy prince and fairy princess; had laid in each other's hand that warm touch of trust and readiness to live and die for each other. It was very wonderful, and she almost forgot their hostile relationship in a rapid back-glance upon the years in which they had lived in mutual love before her unsuspecting eyes. Their prosaic bickering selves were transfigured: her vivid imagination threw off the damage of the years, saw her coarse, red-cheeked father and her too plump mother as the idyllic figures on the lamented parlour vase. And when her thought struggled painfully back to the actual moment, it was with a new concrete sense of its tragic intensity. "O mother, mother!" she cried, as she threw her arms round her. The Greek grammar and the letter fell unregarded to the floor. The fountain of Mrs. Brill's wrongs leapt higher at the sympathy. "And I could have had half-a-dozen young men! The boils of Egypt be upon him! Time after time I said, 'No,' though the Shadchan bewitched my parents into believing that Michael was an angel without wings."