She sometimes hurt very much. She frequently hurt Emmy to the quick, darting in one of her sure careless stabs that shattered Emmy's self-control. So while they loved each other, Jenny also despised Emmy, while Emmy in return hated and was jealous of Jenny, even to the point of actively wishing in moments of furtive and shamefaced savageness to harm her. That was the outward difference between the sisters in time of stress. Of their inner, truer, selves it would be more rash to speak, for in times of peace Jenny had innumerable insights and emotions that would be forever unknown to the elder girl. The sense of rivalry, however, was acute: it coloured every moment of their domestic life, unwinking and incessant. When Emmy came from the scullery into the kitchen bearing her precious dish of stew, and when Jenny, standing up, was measured against her, this rivalry could have been seen by any skilled observer. It rayed and forked about them as lightning might have done about two adjacent trees. Emmy put down her dish.

"Fetch Pa, will you!" she said briefly. One could see who gave orders in the kitchen.

iv

Jenny found her father in his bedroom, sitting before the dressing-table upon which a tall candle stood in an equally tall candlestick. He was looking intently at his reflection in the looking-glass, as one who encounters and examines a stranger. In the glass his face looked red and ugly, and the tossed grey hair and heavy beard were made to appear startlingly unkempt. His mouth was open, and his eyes shaded by lowered lids. In a rather trembling voice he addressed Jenny upon her entrance.

"Is supper ready?" he asked. "I heard you come in."

"Yes, Pa," said Jenny. "Aren't you going to brush your hair? Got a fancy for it like that, have you? My! What a man! With his shirt unbuttoned and his tie out. Come here! Let's have a look at you!" Although her words were unkind, her tone was not, and as she rectified his omissions and put her arm round him Jenny gave her father a light hug. "All right, are you? Been a good boy?"

"Yes … a good boy…." he feebly and waveringly responded. "What's the noos to-night, Jenny?"

Jenny considered. It made her frown, so concentrated was her effort to remember.

"Well, somebody's made a speech," she volunteered. "They can all do
that, can't they! And somebody's paid five hundred pounds transfer for
Jack Sutherdon … is it Barnsley or Burnley?… And—oh, a fire at
Southwark…. Just the usual sort of news, Pa. No murders…."

"Ah, they don't have the murders they used to have," grumbled the old man.

"That's the police, Pa." Jenny wanted to reassure him.

"I don't know how it is," he trembled, stiffening his body and rising from the chair.

"Perhaps they hush 'em up!" That was a shock to him. He could not move until the notion had sunk into his head. "Or perhaps people are more careful…. Don't get leaving themselves about like they used to."

Pa Blanchard had no suggestion. Such perilous ideas, so frequently started by Jenny for his mystification, joggled together in his brain and made there the subject of a thousand ruminations. They tantalised Pa's slowly revolving thoughts, and kept these moving through long hours of silence. Such notions preserved his interest in the world, and his senile belief in Magic, as nothing else could have done.

Together, their pace suited to his step, the two moved slowly to the door. It took a long time to make the short journey, though Jenny supported her father on the one side and he used a stick in his right hand. In the passage he waited while she blew out his candle; and then they went forward to the meal. At the approach Pa's eyes opened wider, and luminously glowed.

"Is there dumplings?" he quivered, seeming to tremble with excitement.

"One for you, Pa!" cried Emmy from the kitchen. Pa gave a small chuckle of joy. His progress was accelerated. They reached the table, and Emmy took his right arm for the descent into a substantial chair. Upon Pa's plate glistened a fair dumpling, a glorious mountain of paste amid the wreckage of meat and gravy. "And now, perhaps," Emmy went on, smoothing back from her forehead a little streamer of hair, "you'll close the door, Jenny…."

It was closed with a bang that made Pa jump and Emmy look savagely up.

"Sorry!" cried Jenny. "How's that dumpling, Pa?" She sat recklessly at the table.

v

To look at the three of them sitting there munching away was a sight not altogether pleasing. Pa's veins stood out from his forehead, and the two girls devoted themselves to the food as if they needed it. There was none of the airy talk that goes on in the houses of the rich while maids or menservants come respectfully to right or left of the diners with decanters or dishes. Here the food was the thing, and there was no speech. Sometimes Pa's eyes rolled, sometimes Emmy glanced up with unconscious malevolence at Jenny, sometimes Jenny almost winked at the lithograph portrait of Edward the Seventh (as Prince of Wales) which hung over the mantelpiece above the one-and-tenpenny-ha'penny clock that ticked away so busily there. Something had happened long ago to Edward the Seventh, and he had a stain across his Field Marshal's uniform. Something had happened also to the clock, which lay upon its side, as if kicking in a death agony. Something had happened to almost everything in the kitchen. Even the plates on the dresser, and the cups and saucers that hung or stood upon the shelves, bore the noble scars of service. Every time Emmy turned her glance upon a damaged plate, as sharp as a stalactite, she had the thought: "Jenny's doing." Every time she looked at the convulsive clock Emmy said to herself: "That was Miss Jenny's cleverness when she chucked the cosy at Alf." And when Emmy said in this reflective silence of animosity the name "Alf" she drew a deep breath and looked straight up at Jenny with inscrutable eyes of pain.

vi

The stew being finished, Emmy collected the plates, and retired once again to the scullery. Now did Jenny show afresh that curiosity whose first flush had been so ill-satisfied by the meat course. When, however, Emmy reappeared with that most domestic of sweets, a bread pudding, Jenny's face fell once more; for of all dishes she most abominated bread pudding. Under her breath she adversely commented.

"Oh lor!" she whispered. "Stew and b.p. What a life!"

Emmy, not hearing, but second sighted on such matters, shot a malevolent glance from her place. In an awful voice, intended to be a trifle arch, she addressed her father.

"Bready butter pudding, Pa?" she inquired. The old man whinnied with delight, and Emmy was appeased. She had one satisfied client, at any rate. She cut into the pudding with a knife, producing wedges with a dexterous hand.

"Hey ho!" observed Jenny to herself, tastelessly beginning the work of laborious demolition.

"Jenny thinks it's common. She ought to have the job of getting the meals!" cried Emmy, bitterly, obliquely attacking her sister by talking at her. "Something to talk about then!" she sneered with chagrin, up in arms at a criticism.

"Well, the truth is," drawled Jenny…. "If you want it … I don't like bread pudding." Somehow she had never said that before, in all the years; but it seemed to her that bread pudding was like ashes in the mouth. It was like duty, or funerals, or … stew.

"The stuff's got to be finished up!" flared Emmy defiantly, with a sense of being adjudged inferior because she had dutifully