Things, Ransome said, had got to be different. They couldn't go on as they were. The anxiety and the discomfort were intolerable. Still, that he had conceived an end to them, showed that he did not yet utterly despair of Violet. She had been terrified by the behavior of the Baby and by the things, the brutal things, the doctor had said to her, and she had made another effort. Ransome's trouble was simply that he couldn't trust her. He said to himself that she had good instincts and good impulses if you could depend on them. But you couldn't. With all her obstinacy she had no staying-power. He recognized in her a lamentable and inveterate flabbiness. If he had known all about her he might have formed a larger estimate of her staying-power. But he did not yet know what she was. That bad word that he had once let out through the window had been in Ranny's simple mind a mere figure of speech, a flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses and her instincts really were. He did not know that what he called her flabbiness was the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor that in them there remained a vigilant and indestructible soul, biding its time, holding its own against maternity, making more and more for self-protection, for assertion, for supremacy. He felt her mystery, but he had never known the ultimate secret of this woman who ate at his board and slept in his bed and had borne his child. It was with his eternal innocence that he put it to her, What were they to do now? And that implacable and inscrutable soul in her was ready for him. It prompted her to say that she couldn't do more than she did, and that if things were to be different he must get some one else to see to them. He must keep a servant. He should have kept one for her long ago. Poor Ranny protested that he'd keep twenty servants for her if he could afford it. As it was, a charwoman every week was more than he could manage, and she knew it. And she said, looking at him very straight, that there was one way they could do it. They could do as other people did. In half the houses in the Avenue they let apartments. They must take a lodger. Violet had thrown out this suggestion more than once lately. And he had put his foot down. Neither he nor Granville, he said, could stand a lodger. A lodger would make Granville too hot by far to hold him. Now in their stress he owned that there was something in it. He would think it over. Thinking it over, he saw more than ever how impossible it was. The charwoman, advancing more and more, had been a fearful strain on his resources, and the expenses of the Baby's birth had brought them to the breaking-point. And then there had been Baby's illnesses. Before that there was the perambulator.