Of this mother, the second Mrs. Lawton, there is little enough to say. She was a pallid, ignorant, helpless slattern, gaunt of frame, narrow of forehead, and bowed and wrinkled before her time. Like her husband, she came of an ancestry of lake and canal boatmen; and though twenty odd years had passed since increasing railroad competition forced her parents to abandon their over-mortgaged scow and seek a living in the farm country, and she married the young widower Ben Lawton in preference to following them, her notions of housekeeping and of existence generally had never expanded beyond the limits of a canal-boat cabin. She rose at a certain hour, maundered along wearily through such tasks of the day as forced themselves upon her, and got to bed again as early as might be, inertly thankful that the day was done. She rarely went out upon the street, and still more rarely had any clothes fit to go out in. She had a vague pride in her daughter Samantha, who seemed to her to resemble the heroines of the continued stories which she assiduously followed in the _Fireside Weekly_, and sometimes she harbored a formless kind of theory that if her baby boy Alonzo had lived, things would have been different; but her interest in the rest of the family was of the dimmest and most spasmodic sort. In England she would have taken to drink, and been beaten for it, and thus at least extracted from life’s pilgrimage some definite sensations. As it was, she lazily contributed vile cooking, a foully-kept house, and a grotesque waste of the pittances which came into her hands, to the general squalor which hung like an atmosphere over the Lawtons. The house to which Jessica had come with her father the previous afternoon was to her a strange abode. At the time of her flight, five years before, the family had lived on a cross-road some miles away; at present they were encamped, so to speak, in an old and battered structure which had been a country house in its time, but was now in the centre of a new part of Thessaly built up since war. The building, with its dingy appearance and poverty-stricken character, was an eyesore to the neighborhood, and everybody looked hopefully forward to the day when the hollow in which it stood should be filled up, and the house and its inhabitants cleared away out of sight.