‘What are you Missus Polleying me for?’ his helpmeet turned on him briskly. ‘You ain’t going to deny the tricks you played me when first we went together, Polley? It is as well to keep you out of temptation, though I should just like to see you trying on that trade again, now that I’ve got the upper hand, and you’ve got some notion of the value of a good wife, as has kept a roof over your and the gals’ heads, and a full table, and the shop flourishing more than it ever did in your day. You ought to bless your stars, Polley, that you ever set eyes on my face, or that I consented to have a bad bargain in you.’ ’Mily Polley was a little tired of hearing the chronicle of her father’s delinquencies and her mother’s virtues; she broke in upon the monologue, reminding her mother of an instance of inconsistency in her conduct. ‘I wonder, mother, you ever let poetry books lie in the house or suffer ’Liza to look into them.’ ‘You know as well as I do, ’Mily,’ Mrs. Polley explained, shortly, ‘that ’Liza has not been so strong as the rest of you gals, and when she has not been able to sit up with her colds and influenzas, there was no great wrong done in her diverting herself with a book, though I could have wished it had been of a more sensible and serious kind. I did try to set Mr. Holland upon her about that.’ ‘I was dumpish enough, I can tell you, without reading mouldy sermons,’ grumbled ’Liza. ‘I wonder how any of you would have liked to be condemned either to do that or count your fingers, for my strength was that gone I was not able so much as to hold a crochet-hook, and Mr. Holland said there was no harm in my pieces, some of them were most elegant.’ ‘Then ’Liza’s books,’ said Ann Polley, who was commonplace and practical to excess, ‘are not ’Liza’s any more than ours, only that she looks into them sometimes. They are school prizes and Christmas gifts, and keepsakes from friends, though I think they might hit on better presents. It would be a great pity if you were so far left to yourself as to burn them, mother, since some of them are quite handsome “table books,” which I should be sorry to handle except to dust, for fear of spoiling their red and green and gold backs. They are a great ornament laid round the drawing-room table.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Polley, decidedly, ‘that is the right place for them. They will turn nobody’s feather head, and waste nobody’s time save in the dusting, lying there.’ CHAPTER XIV. THE FIRST ATTEMPT.