with her rent, with half of her quarter's rent, and he had extended
the days of grace a month; her sense that some day she might need
the same mercy again made her his abject slave. She was afraid even
to ask that he should cause the roof to be mended for fear he might
take offence. But one night the rain poured in on her bed and gave
her a cold, and stained and soaked her poor old patchwork counterpane.
Then she got me to compose an excessively polite letter to old
Pettigrew, begging him as a favor to perform his legal obligations.
It is part of the general imbecility of those days that such one-sided
law as existed was a profound mystery to the common people, its
provisions impossible to ascertain, its machinery impossible to set
in motion. Instead of the clearly written code, the lucid statements
of rules and principles that are now at the service of every one,
the law was the muddle secret of the legal profession. Poor people,
overworked people, had constantly to submit to petty wrongs because
of the intolerable uncertainty not only of law but of cost, and of
the demands upon time and energy, proceedings might make. There
was indeed no justice for any one too poor to command a good
solicitor's deference and loyalty; there was nothing but rough
police protection and the magistrate's grudging or eccentric advice
for the mass of the population. The civil law, in particular, was
a mysterious upper-class weapon, and I can imagine no injustice that
would have been sufficient to induce my poor old mother to appeal
to it.

All this begins to sound incredible. I can only assure you that it
was so.

But I, when I learned that old Pettigrew had been down to tell my
mother all about his rheumatism, to inspect the roof, and to allege