“There was summat queer about her ever coming at all!” ... Mrs. Tanner lingered, cogitating, in the empty street. “What, she never stirred foot even for t’ Coronation, you’ll think on—(Edward was it, or George?). You and she have never been that thick, I’m sure, that she should turn out to wish you luck!” “She talked that strange, too,” the charwoman puzzled, thinking back, “praising me up and so on, and yet wi’ a scrat in it all the time! She fair made me begin to think things was going to go all wrong.” “It’s that way she has of making you feel she knows summat important as you don’t. It’s like as if she give you plenty o’ rope to hang yourself, and then stood about smiling, waiting for the pull. Ay, and what you’d feel right sore about when it come to it wouldn’t be as you was hung, but feeling you’d made a fool o’ yourself with yon woman a-looking on!” “Ay, that’s summat like it,” Mrs. Clapham murmured. “That’s it, I reckon....” She threw a glance up the street at the silent, ill-omened house. “It’s no wonder she made such a wreck o’ Poor Stephen.” The Saga of Poor Stephen who had fallen in the War began all over again, with precisely the same zest as if sung for the first time. It was a sort of duet into which they fell quite naturally whenever they happened to meet, and however often it was repeated it never palled. Conversation is almost the only form of artistic expression open to most of the poor, and on this subject at least these two had reached a high level. The Saga of Poor Stephen was, indeed, their star performance. Knowing it like their prayers, they played up to each other with mechanical ease, yet found always some shade of inflection which might possibly be bettered, some sentence introduced or eliminated which shed new light upon the whole. And always, as soon as they had parted, their minds set to work again upon the scene they had just played, half consciously rehearsing it for its next public appearance, and seeking some fresh touch which should cause it to live anew. However, they rang the curtain down at length, and drifted apart—Mrs. Tanner backing towards her door with that almost unconscious movement of street-gossips—as if she was pulled by a string—and the charwoman turning joyously home to her own dwelling. She reached it in less than a dozen strides, but even in that short distance she produced the effect of a full-rigged ship coming buoyantly into port. Crossing the step, she had a passing twinge of remorse because she had neglected to give it its second scrub; and then she was once again in the little kitchen, with the door closing behind her back.