with one.

There were gaps in the stories of his mother and Granny concerning which
he never got a direct reply from them, but by degrees he picked up many
missing details from other sources. What he learned in this way
indicated merely that they had been very poor at times, and poverty had
forced them to earn a living by work that was quite honest and decent,
but not "socially respectable." At one time, before her daughter was old
enough to assume a share of the burden, Granny had actually had to fall
back on the coarsest and humblest menial work--scrubbing and washing by
the day in strange houses. Yet she and her daughter appeared throughout
that ordeal to have remained on terms of pleasant intimacy with friends
of the class to which they regarded themselves as properly belonging.

Another problem never solved for Keith was what kind of schooling his
mother had had. Her own failure to tell suggested that it must have been
of the slightest. Yet Keith never thought of her as ignorant. She had a
bright, eager mind that, when not clouded, acted as a goad on his own.
It was she who taught him to read and filled him with an awe for books
and book-learning that was, perhaps, not entirely wholesome. She herself
read eagerly, though fitfully, her interest in all such matters varying
greatly with her mood and condition. Her day-dreaming was to a large
extent directed toward matters literary and artistic. Sometimes, when
she had read some novel with a markedly sentimental appeal, she talked
vaguely of old ambitions to write, but as a rule it was her ignorance of
music that she deplored. In the meantime her lace-making and her
embroidery proved an artistic sense not wholly confined to dreams. She
was always busy with some work of that kind, but her longings went far
beyond it, and it happened more than once that she let her work drop in
her lap while she looked at Keith with an expression he could not