This lurid little picture of vivid happenings in unoccupied houses and particularly of the prim, industrious, capable Susan Burnet, biting aggressive wrists, stuck in Lady Harman’s imagination. She seemed to be looking into hitherto unsuspected pits of simple and violent living just beneath her feet. Susan told some upholsteress love tales, real love tales, with a warmth and honesty of passion in them that seemed at once dreadful and fine to Lady Harman’s underfed imagination. Under encouragement Susan expanded the picture, beyond these mere glimpses of workshop and piece-work and furtive lust. It appeared that she was practically the head of her family; there was a mother who had specialized in ill-health, a sister of defective ability who stayed at home, a brother in South Africa who was very good and sent home money, and three younger sisters growing up. And father,—she evaded the subject of father at first. Then presently Lady Harman had some glimpses of an earlier phase in Susan Burnet’s life “before any of us were earning money.” Father appeared as a kindly, ineffectual, insolvent figure struggling to conduct a baker’s and confectioner’s business in Walthamstow, mother was already specializing, there were various brothers and sisters being born and dying. “How many were there of you altogether?” asked Lady Harman. “Thirteen there was. Father always used to laugh and say he’d had a fair baker’s dozen. There was Luke to begin with——” Susan began to count on her fingers and recite braces of scriptural names. She could only make up her tale to twelve. She became perplexed. Then she remembered. “Of course!” she cried: “there was Nicodemus. He was still-born. I _always_ forget Nicodemus, poor little chap! But he came—was it sixth or seventh?—seventh after Anna.” She gave some glimpses of her father and then there was a collapse of which she fought shy. Lady Harman was too delicate to press her to talk of that. But one day in the afternoon Susan’s tongue ran. She was telling how first she went to work before she was twelve. “But I thought the board schools——” said Lady Harman. “I had to go before the committee,” said Susan. “I had to go before the committee and ask to be let go to work. There they was, sitting round a table in a great big room, and they was as kind as anything, one old gentleman with a great white beard, he was as kind as could be. ‘Don’t you be frightened, my dear,’ he says. ‘You tell us why you want to go out working.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘_somebody’s_ got to earn something,’ and that made them laugh in a sort of fatherly way, and after that there wasn’t any difficulty. You see it was after Father’s Inquest, and everybody was disposed to be kind to us. ‘Pity they can’t all go instead of this educational Tommy Rot,’ the old gentleman says. ‘You learn to work, my dear’—and I did....” She paused. “Father’s inquest?” said Lady Harman.