She faced a day of pelting worry, wherein she was brought up against the lachrimæ rerum, the Tearful Dismalness of Human Things. Soot fell down the neglected dining-room chimney, so that the room became a greasy horror of smut. The summoned sweep, having washed himself for the afternoon and settled down to tobacco and beer, and the construction of a rabbit-hutch for his children, arrived with the air of a man peculiarly aggrieved, and treated her with studied impoliteness. He proclaimed justification in having voted against her at the last election for the Greenwich Borough Council. Any woman of sense would have called him in a couple of months ago. It was hard to bear. Then, Florence, the parlour-maid, gave notice. She was going to get married to the beefy young man with whom she had been
