The weather had broken. It wasn’t hot any more, but raw and chilly. The way he’d laugh, and look at you, so interested in any little thing you said! It was wonderful. What time did people in the world get up and start their day? Later than this, no doubt. But there’d be the waiting-room, where she’d sat with Sister Dominic and the orphans that first time of all. (Maybe she’d never set eyes on Dominic again.) What for did that maid of his take so long to come to the door? But it wasn’t the maid who opened the door at last. It was a person in a blue apron, with a man’s cap pulled down over her eyes, and her sleeves rolled up, and a bucket with a mop in it at her down-at-heel feet. “’E ain’t come yet. Won’t be ’ere, not for a hower, but if it’s the toothache, you can come in and wait.” “Does he not live here, then?” “Ho no,’e don’t live ’ere. But ’e comes reg’lar, and ’e’ll be along by-and-by. You go in and sit down. You won’t mind me going on with the cleaning-up? Turned cold all of a sudden, ain’t it?” The rolled-back carpet in the waiting-room, the chairs piled, seat against seat, round the walls, the broom that presently chased into all the corners, made it seem colder. It grew colder and colder as the hour went by. That was the sound of a key in the lock outside. “’Morning, Mrs. Hatch. A nasty change in the weather, isn’t it?” Mumble, mumble, mumble. “Oh Lord, already!” He came into the room where Sister Clara shuddered and cowered inside her folds of enveloping black serge. Look at the face of him! Different, somehow. You could see how he felt the sudden chilliness in the air, and he was rubbing his hands together, hard. They were different, too--all mottled with cold. “You in pain, Sister?” “I--I’ve come.” “M’m? I don’t attend to anyone till nine o’clock, you know, as a rule, but if it’s a question of pain.... Well, what can I do for you? By the look of you, it’s an abscess, isn’t it?” THE APPEAL THE APPEAL This isn’t a story. It’s an attempt at reconstruction. Given my knowledge of the principals--Mary Jarvis, and her mother, Mrs. St. Luth--I think I can do it. Mary Jarvis was my mother, and Mrs. St. Luth, of course, my grandmother. Thank god, I’m a modern and can look at them impersonally--judge each on her own merits, as it were. My mother and my grandmother made scenes as other women make jumpers. It was their form of self-expression. I imagine--although I never knew for certain--that it was my father’s inability to maintain himself _à la hauteur_, in the perennial melodrama that was my mother’s idea of life, that led to my grandmother being invited to live with them. She came when I, their only child, had barely reached the stage of exchanging my baby frills for first knickerbockers. (I am certain, although I don’t remember it, that my mother wept and said she felt that she had lost her baby for ever.)