to fifty shillings a week. The pension, of course, would cease upon his
death; but so long as life was kept burning within him nothing could
affect the amounts paid weekly into the Blanchard exchequer. Pa was
fifty-seven, and normally would have had a respectable number of years
before him; his wants were now few, and his days were carefully watched
over by his daughters. He would continue to draw his pensions for
several years yet, unless something unexpected happened to him.
Meanwhile, therefore, his pipe was regularly filled and his old pewter
tankard appeared at regular intervals, in order that Pa should feel as
little as possible the change in his condition.

Mrs. Blanchard had been dead ten years. She had been very much as Emmy
now was, but a great deal more cheerful. She had been plump and
fresh-coloured, and in spite of Pa Blanchard's ways she had led a happy
life. In the old days there had been friends and neighbours, now all
lost in course of removals from one part of London to another, so that
the girls were without friends and knew intimately no women older than
themselves. Mrs. Blanchard, perhaps in accord with her cheerfulness, had
been a complacent, selfish little woman, very neat and clean, and
disposed to keep her daughters in their place. Jenny had been her
favourite; and even so early had the rivalry between them been
established. Besides this, Emmy had received all the rebuffs needed to
check in her the same complacent selfishness that distinguished her
mother. She had been frustrated all along, first by her mother, then by
her mother's preference for Jenny, finally (after a period during which
she dominated the household after her mother's death) by Jenny herself.
It was thus not upon a pleasant record of personal success that Emmy
could look back, but rather upon a series of chagrins of which each was
the harder to bear because of the history of its precursors. Emmy,
between eighteen and nineteen at the time of her mother's death, had