shrillness, looking angrily at the rugged face and figure before her.

"Mebbe yo'd go an talk to t' master?" suggested Mrs. Dixon, not without,
as it seemed to Netta, a touch of slyness in eyes and voice. Of course
they all knew by now that she was a cipher--that she was not to count.
Edmund had been giving all the orders--in his miserly cheese-paring way.
No comforts!--no conveniences!--not even bare necessaries, for herself
and the child. Yet she knew very well that her husband was a rich
man.

She turned and went in search of him, making her way with difficulty
through the piles of boxes. What could be in them all? Edmund must have
been buying for years. Every now and then as she stooped to look at the
labels pasted upon them, she caught names well known to her. Orbatelli,
Via dei Bardi 13, Firenze; Bianchi, Via Mazzini 12, Lucca; Fratelli
Masai, Via Manzoni, Pisa. And everywhere the recurrent word--_Antichità_.

How she hated the word!--how she hated the associations linked with it,
and with the names on the boxes. They were bound up with a score of
humbling memories, the memories of her shabby, struggling youth. She
thought of her father--the needy English artist, Robert Smeath, with just
a streak, and no more than a streak, of talent, who had become rapidly
"Italianate" in the Elizabethan sense--had dropped, that is, the English
virtues, without ever acquiring the Italian. He had married her mother, a
Florentine girl, the daughter of a small _impiegato_ living in one of the
dismal new streets leading out of Florence on the east, and had then
pursued a shifting course between the two worlds, the English and the
Italian, ordering his household and bringing up his children in Italian
fashion, while he was earning his keep and theirs, not at all by the
showy pictures in his studio which no one would buy, but as jackal in