"housemaid" she had been compelled to suddenly discharge, and that we
were waiting for the arrival of a new and better specimen. But the
months passed and we still waited, and my father on the rare days when
a client would ring the office bell, would, after pausing a decent
interval, open the front door himself, and then call downstairs
indignantly and loudly, to know why "Jane" or "Mary" could not attend
to their work. And my mother, that the bread-boy or the milkman might
not put it about the neighbourhood that the Kelvers in the big corner
house kept no servant, would hide herself behind a thick veil and
fetch all things herself from streets a long way off.

For this family of whom I am writing were, I confess, weak and human.
Their poverty they were ashamed of as though it were a crime, and in
consequence their life was more full of paltry and useless subterfuge
than should be perhaps the life of brave men and women. The larder, I
fancy, was very often bare, but the port and sherry with the sweet
biscuits stood always on the sideboard; and the fire had often to be
low in the grate that my father's tall hat might shine resplendent and
my mother's black silk rustle on Sundays.

But I would not have you sneer at them, thinking all pretence must
spring from snobbishness and never from mistaken self-respect. Some
fine gentleman writers there be--men whose world is bounded on the
east by Bond Street--who see in the struggles of poverty to hide its
darns only matter for jest. But myself, I cannot laugh at them. I
know the long hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the
long cost of the cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from
the confectioner's. But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous.
Heroism is not all of one pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of
Wales come to see him, would have put his bread and cheese and jug of