Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/284

272 table around and placed Bailey's chair opposite hers—by which manœuver Mrs. Joliffe was left in the place of the outsider. As a final touch, Hetty helped the vegetables; and there was something hard to define in the way in which she passed her mother's plate. It was perhaps unconscious and unintentional; but it made Mrs. Joliffe feel that the hand of a slighting charity was extended to her with the food.

"I 'm not wanted," she told herself. "I 'll go away. I 'll go away an' live by mesilf." But she had spent too much of her own money on the despised furniture and decorations of the flat, and she was too proud to ask for it back. The prospect of a lonely and useless old age frightened her even more than poverty. She wanted work to do; and here was work, if Hetty would only let her do it. "What 's the matter with the child?" she asked herself. "What 've I done to her? I 'm that worried I 've got the heartburn." And she rubbed her waist-line pathetically and blinked her faded eyes.

She did not appreciate this desire of a young life to mold its own circumstances, direct its own plans, achieve its new ambitions. She saw herself thrust aside by a filial jealousy that seemed to her the most horrible ingratitude, unnatural and heart-breaking; and this jealousy, having begun in ill-temper, continued in that aspect, because the girl was best able to justify herself in her own eyes by preserving her resentment against her mother, even after Mrs. Joliffe had been reduced to the meekness of despair.