Of course, he thought she would come back, with a sharp lesson well learnt. She had to learn that he was grown-up, of an age to act for himself and choose and think without her tutelage. Only, she did not come back. She went to Madge and stayed with Madge; and the terms on which she stayed were her terms. “I furnish the room,” she said, “and I pay you a rent for it. Also, I pay for what I eat.”
She paid. At the age of fifty-two the mother of Sara Branstone, of Branstone and Carter, and the mother-in-law of George Chappie, of the Chappie Window-Cleaning and Bill Posting Company (a smaller affair than its name, but the source of a regular five pounds a week), was a charwoman on three days out of the seven, and it was not lack of offers which limited her to three days, but the fact that she paid her way on three days’ result. She kept other people’s houses as clean as she had kept her own.
It was suggested to George Chappie that it was hardly decent in him to allow his mother-in-law to go out charring at her age--a prosperous man like him. “I know,” he was reported to have replied, “and we’ve tried all ways we can. But you can’t argue with Mrs. Branstone.”
“She’s one of the old sort, isn’t she?” said his gossip, who, perhaps, endured a mother-in-law of another kind.
|ONLY by long service does one become an artist, but one becomes married by a simple ceremony. It is the tragedy of marriage, which is the most difficult of all the arts, that most people come to it without apprenticeship. Perhaps the popularity of widows as brides is due to the fact that the widow is a widow: that she has been broken in to marriage: that she has not everything to learn: that one, at any rate, of the contracting parties, is expert. There is much to be said for the policy of the “trial trip.”
Courtship, if intimate enough, may be a fairish substitute, bowdlerized, as it were, for a “trial trip,” but when Sam married Ada he knew pitiably little about her.
He thought that she was wonderful. Not only had he to think it, but he actually did think it. He had to think it because only for a prodigy among women could he have treated his mother as he did. He had thought her crazy when she put her hand into the lire, but he knew it was heroic. If she were crazy, it was for love for him, and at the core, he loved her too and felt ashamed of himself, but Ada stood between them, and he was not going to give up Ada. Then he was busy, time wore on, custom blunted the prick of conscience, and it finally became a habit either not to think of Anne at all, or to think comfortably of her as happy enough with Madge.