Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/192

 "Well, I want the hot-water bottle. You'll have to heat water. And make it hot, not just lukewarm. It's worse again. It's never been so bad."

As he went off to the kitchen, fragments of her plaints followed him: "I should think you'd have remembered about the hot-water bottle!" And, "If you'd had such pain as mine for fifteen years. . . ."

Yes, fifteen years!

For fifteen years it had been like this. The old wicked thought came stealing back into his mind. If only he had a wife like Emma Downes or her daughter-in-law, Naomi. . . some one young like Naomi. He was growing older, older, older. . ..

He began again to repeat the Psalm, saying it aloud while he waited by the stove for the kettle to boil. 

In the Flats the number of deaths began to mount one by one with the passing of each day. When disease appeared in any of the black, decaying houses, it had its way, taking now a child, now a wife, now a husband, for bodies that were overworked and undernourished had small chance of life in a region where the very air stank and the only stream was simply an open sewer. Doctors came and went, sometimes too carelessly, for there was small chance of pay, and to the people on the Hill the life of a worker was worth little. The creatures of the Flats were somehow only a sort of mechanical animal which produced and produced and went on producing.

The churches went on sending missionaries and money to the most remote corners of the earth; the clergy-