Jehane was anxious to earn her living. But how? She had been trained to do nothing. Barrington bought her a little cottage near Southgate, which at this time was still in the country. Gradually he got into the habit of letting her do a little outside reading for his firm--he did it to enable her to pretend that she was self-supporting. To his surprise she developed a faculty for the work and he began to trust her judgment. She had inherited a literary instinct of which, during her married life, she had remained unaware. It was a feeble instinct, but in the end it proved sufficiently rewarding. She took to writing sentimental novelettes, which found a market. Whatever her faults of heart, she had always been capable and gifted with a strong sense of duty; so, now that she had found a means of making money, she worked hard with her pen, stinting herself and treating her children with foolish liberality. Her chief regret was that Ocky had spoilt the marriage chances of her girls; she tried to rub out this social stain by creating the impression that her husband was dead. She had two extravagances--the purchase of hair-tonics and a mania for visiting fortune-tellers. She had one great hope--that in the future she might re-marry. This would entail Ocky's death; but she was not so cruel as to reason that out. She had one great mission--to teach her daughters to catch men. Her chief theme of conversation with her children was the wickedness of their father and the heroic loyalty of her own conduct. No doubt there were times when her conscience troubled her. Peter was just fifteen and Kay was nearly nine when all this happened. It made a deep impression on both of them, but especially on Peter. For months the crushed shoulders and sunken face of Uncle Waffles haunted his memory, so that it seemed a crime to be happy. He could not bear to enter the stable; he was always expecting to hear a hoarse voice addressing him in a whisper from the loft, calling him a ha'penny marvel or enquiring whether he knew the story of the husband whose wife had black hair. Often in the street he would turn sharply at the sight of some shabby outcast, shuffling through the crowd with bowed head. He would run to the window, hardly daring to own what he expected, when he heard the mournful singing along the Terrace of a group of out-of-works: “We've got no work to do, We've got no work to do; We're all thrown out, poor labourin' men, And we've got no work to do.” Sooner or later he would recognize, he knew, in one of the tattered singers his Uncle Waffles. Peter was suffering from a suddenly awakened social conscience; he did not know enough to call it that.