"You've no call to talk to me like that, Joe. It's not right."
Deliberately he rose and turned his back.
"A don't know much," he growled in his chest, "but A do know that then."
"I thart you were straight, Joe," she said.
He warmed his hands at the blaze; and she knew he was grinning, and the nature of the grin.
"A thought so maself till A found A wasn't," he answered. "No man knows what's in him till he's tried--that's ma notion of it. Then he'll have a good few surprises, same as A've done. A man's a very funny thing when he's along of a woman he loves--that's ma experience."
Ruth trembled, and her hand swept to and fro with the graceful motions of a circling eagle over the child's frock she was ironing.
"Then A make you feel just same gate as A feel maself."
"You ought to marry, Joe--a man like you with all that nature in you."
"Never--only if so be A can get the woman A want."
There was another silence. Then the woman spoke again, this time with the hushed curiosity of a child.
Her hand swooped rhythmically; and there was the gentle accompanying thud of the iron taking the table and circling smoothly about its work.
"Your Ern's got what he wants--and what A want too."
Boots brushing themselves on the mat outside made themselves heard. Then the door opened.
"Coom in, Ern," he said. "Just right. Keep t' peace atween us. She and me gettin across each other as usual."
A few days later Ernie came home immediately after work instead of repairing to the _Star_. As he entered the room Ruth saw there was something up. He was sober--terribly so.
"I've no one to blame only meself," he said, disarming her, as he disarmed everyone by his Christian quality.
Ruth did not reproach him: that was not her way. Nor did she sit down and cry: she had expected the catastrophe too long. She took the boy from the cradle and opened her bodice.
"You shan't suffer anyways," she said, half to herself, half to the child, and stared out of the window, babe at breast, rocking gently and with tapping foot.
Ern slouched out; and Ruth was left alone, to face as best she could the spectre that haunts through life the path of the immense majority of the human race. She had watched its slinking approach for years. Now with a patter of hushed feet, dreadful in the fury of its assault, it was on her. Remorseless in attack as in pursuit it was hounding her and hers slowly down a dreary slope to a lingering death, of body and spirit alike, in that hungry morass, the name of which is Unemployment.