During the course of the morning Mrs. Townsend went around with knitted brows, pondering deeply over the vexed question. Her back ached and her feet were weary long before her household labours were ended. She wasn’t accustomed to doing her own work, and, though she was willing, experience, that time-saver, was not hers. Mrs. Townsend knew that ladies were popularly supposed to bring a deftness and daintiness to kitchen work that was lacking in the efforts of a rougher class, but for herself it was just the opposite. The scalding kettles and saucepans she carried would perform a tremolo movement with the shaking of her slight wrists that sent greasy splashes of the contents over the kitchen floor; the beef-steak she broiled took in not only the fire but the whole top of the range in its sputterings, and plates and dishes, whether empty or filled with food for the table, slipped from her tired fingers and broke with ruinous celerity. After all the ceaseless effort of her heroic incapacity she was forced to long for the look of shining cleanliness accomplished easily by the strong, accustomed arms of an ordinary “girl.” And the children were going half-clothed, she had so little time to sew! If this sort of thing didn’t stop soon she didn’t know what would become of them all. Depression had grown to be her usual frame of mind in the morning when there was no one to look at her. She had known that Francis couldn’t get a place when he was so shabby. People were afraid of men who looked poor; it seemed as if they couldn’t be capable. In spite of himself she must save him, though he hurled javelins at her afterwards. She would have gone and bought him the trousers out of hand if remembrance had not brought uncomfortably to mind a time when she had tried to demonstrate how economically she could regulate his smoking by purchasing an advertized box of cigars from a department store. To Polly Townsend, if you did a certain thing one certain effect ought to follow—that, instead, it ramified off into all sorts of different ways was the mean advantage life took over theory. She felt now that if she could only make her Francis buy those trousers he couldn’t help realizing gratefully afterwards how wise and good she’d been, and her heart glowed at the prospect. But Mr. Effingham! He was a man whose old-fashioned punctiliousness was notably affected by externals: by suitable dress, by polish of manner, by a certain air in addition to more solid requirements. It was bad enough for Francis to hand the plate in those hideous, old, faded, mended trousers, but to go supplicantly in them to Mr. Effingham would be suicidal. She could have wept at the thought.