I suppose I spent seven or eight months in discovering that Mrs. Pelly was a singularly unpleasant woman. But the thing did eventually become plain to me, so plain indeed that it would have caused me to give up my French window and writing-table and migrate once more, but for certain considerations outside my own personal comfort. That Mrs. Pelly consumed far more gin than was good for her became apparent to me during my first week, if not my first day, in Howard Street. But as she rarely entered my room, and our encounters were merely accidental and momentary, this weakness would never have affected me much. What did affect me was my very gradual discovery of the fact that this woman treated her own daughter with systematic cruelty--a thing happily unusual in her class, as it is also, I think, among the very poor of London. At the end of eight or nine months my increasing knowledge of Mrs. Pelly's harsh unkindness to Fanny had begun to weigh on my mind a good deal. It was a singular case, in many ways. Here was a girl, a young woman rather, in her twenty-first year, who to all intents and purposes might be said to be carrying on with her own hands the entire work of a house which sheltered five lodgers; and, as a fact, it was rarely that a day passed without her suffering actual physical violence at the hands of that gin-soaked termagant, her mother. The woman positively used to pinch Fanny in such a way as to leave blue bruises on her arm. She used to pull her hair violently, slap her face, and strike at her with any sort of weapon that happened to be within reach. Further, when the vicious fit took her, she would lock up pantry and kitchen, and make this hard-working girl go hungry to bed at night, by way of punishment for some pretended misdeed. And the astounding thing was that, with all this and more, Fanny retained a very real affection for her unnatural parent; and used to plead that, but for the effect of liquor upon her, Mrs. Pelly would be and was a good mother. It appeared that Fanny had lost her father when she was about twelve years old, and ever since that time her mother's extraordinary attitude towards her had become increasingly harsh and cruel. She never had a penny of her own, though she did the work of two servants, and her clothes were mostly home-made make-shifts from discarded garments of her mother's. When necessity caused her to ask for new boots, for example, the penalty would be perhaps a week of vile abuse and bullying, of slaps, pinches, docked meals and other humiliations, all of which must be endured before the wretched woman would buy a pair of the cheapest and ugliest shoes obtainable, and fling them to her daughter from out her market-basket. If they were a misfit, Fanny would have to suffer them as best she could. Or, in other cases, new shoes would be refused altogether, and she would be ordered to make shift with a pair her mother had worn out.