Perhaps he had not clearly stated his ambition or perhaps she had not clearly understood, but while he expected her to be a pupil long after her Staithley days were past, she was not looking beyond Staithley, she was not seeing why work should be continuous now that it had ceased to be a new sensation. She was avid of results and grew sullen at her labor which seemed to lead nowhere but to more labor. He consulted Mrs. Butterworth: was Mary Ellen ill? “I’ll? She’s got horse-strength, but you can overdrive a horse. All work and no play is good for nobody.” “She goes to concerts,” he protested. “That’s part of her work, and part of her trouble, too. Going and hearing others sing and you telling her to watch them and to learn what to avoid, and she fancying she’s better than they are, an’ all.” “She is better.” “Then it doesn’t help her to know it and to know they sing in public and she doesn’t.” “She shan’t sing yet. What am I to do?” “Take her mind off it. It’s always concerts. There are theaters.” There were. There was one in Staithley (there was even, depth below the deep, a music-hall), but the feeling existed that if playgoing was done at all it should be done furtively and though Walter would not have dreamed of putting music and drama in two categories the one labeled respectable and the other disreputable, he had to defer to the prejudices of those who did. He lived by teaching music and singing to the offspring of Staithley’s upper ten, and there might be tolerance amongst them, but he had to be on the safe side and to take the view that the theater was a detrimental place. This was self-protective habit which recently had crystallized into something approaching conviction through the action of one Chown. The crime of Mr. Chown, and to Walter it was no less than crime, was to translate the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers to the music-halls, where they had made much money by (Walter held) debasing their musical standards. But the music-hall was not the theater and he had to admit, on reflection, that there was really no connection between Mr. Chown’s vulgarization of the musical taste of the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers and Mary Ellen’s going to the play. There was Shakespeare and if it was prudent for him not to go with her himself, there was Mrs. Butterworth, who stood awaiting his decision with a notable and not disinterested anxiety. It was not disinterested because the slave had her relaxation, her weekly “night out” when she threw the shackles off and forgot in the pit of the Theater Royal that she was housekeeper, valet, nurse and mother to Walter Pate. Not his to ask nor his to tell what delicious freedom she found in those emancipated hours, but hers the hope to add to them when she cunningly prescribed the theater as a cure for Mary Ellen’s restiveness. “Would you go with her?” he asked shyly, his tone implying that now, if never before, he was her petitioner.