There was no doubt that Mark--with the possible addition of the Wannops--made a very strong backing for Christopher if she decided to make a public scandal about him. . . . As for the Wannops . . . the girl was negligible. Or possibly not, if she turned nasty and twisted Christopher round her fingers. But the old mother was a formidable figure--with a bad tongue, and viewed with a certain respect in places where people talked . . . both on account of her late husband's position and of the solid sort of articles she wrote. . . . She, Sylvia, had gone to take a look at the place where these people lived . . . a dreary street in an outer suburb, the houses--she knew enough about estates to know--what is called tile-healed, the upper parts of tile, the lower flimsy brick and the tiles in bad condition. Oldish houses really, in spite of their sham artistic aspect, and very much shadowed by old trees that must have been left to add to the picturesqueness. . . . The rooms poky, and they must be very dark. . . . The residence of extreme indigence, or of absolute poverty. . . . She understood that the old lady's income had so fallen off during the war that they had nothing to live on but what the girl made as a school-teacher, or a teacher of athletics in a girls' school. . . . She had walked two or three times up and down the street with the idea that the girl might come out: then it had struck her that was rather an ignoble proceeding, really. . . . It was, for the matter of that, ignoble that she should have a rival who starved in an ashbin. . . . But that was what men were like: she might think herself lucky that the girl did not inhabit a sweetshop. . . . And the man, Macmaster, said that the girl had a good head and talked well, though the woman Macmaster said that she was a shallow ignoramus. . . . That last probably was not true; at any rate the girl had been the Macmaster woman's most intimate friend for many years--as long as they were sponging on Christopher and until, lower middle-class snobs as they were, they began to think they could get into Society by carneying to herself. . . . Still, the girl probably was a good talker and, if little, yet physically uncommonly fit. . . . A good homespun article. . . . She wished her no ill! What was incredible was that Christopher should let her go on starving in such a poverty-stricken place when he had something like the wealth of the Indies at his disposal. . . . But the Tietjens were hard people! You could see that in Mark's rooms . . . and Christopher would lie on the floor as lief as in a goose-feather bed. And probably the girl would not take his money. She was quite right. That was the way to keep him. . . . She herself had no want of comprehension of the stimulation to be got out of parsimonious living. . . . In retreat at her convent she lay as hard and as cold as any anchorite, and rose to the nuns' matins at four.