The Real Charlotte. 265 



that she'd never have come to Bray for the winter only for 

 being able to look out at the waves all day long. 



Poor Mrs. Fitzpatrick did not tell her friends that she 

 had, nowadays, things to occupy herself with that scarcely 

 left her time tor taking full advantage of this privilege. P>om 

 the hour of the awakening of her brood to that midnight 

 moment when, with fingers roughened and face flushed from 

 the darning of stockings, she toiled up to bed, she was 

 scarcely conscious that the sea existed, except when Dottie 

 came in with her boots worn into holes by the pebbles of 

 the beach, or Georgie's Sunday trousers were found to be 

 smeared with tar from riding astride the upturned boats. 

 There were no longer for her the afternoon naps that were 

 so pleasantly composing after four o'clock dinner ; it was 

 now her part to clear away and wash the dishes and plates, 

 so as to leave Bridget, the "general," free to affair herself 

 with the clothes-lines in the back garden, whereon the family 

 linen streamed and ballooned in the east wind that is the 

 winter prerogative of Bray. She had grown perceptibly 

 thinner under this discipline, and her eyes had dark swellings 

 beneath them that seemed pathetically unbecoming to any- 

 one who, like Francie, had last seen her when the rubicund 

 prosperity of Mountjoy Square had not yet worn away. 

 Probably an Englishwoman of her class would have kept her 

 household in comparative comfort with less effort and more 

 success, but Aunt Tish was very far from being an English- 

 woman ; her eyes were not formed to perceive dirt, nor her 

 nose to apprehend smells, and her idea of domestic economy 

 was to indulge in no extras of soap or scrubbing brushes, 

 and to feed her family on strong tea and indifferent bread 

 and butter, in order that Ida's and Mabel's hats might be 

 no whit less ornate than those of their neighbours. 



Francie had plunged into the heart of this squalor with 

 characteristic recklessness ; and the effusion of welcome 

 with which she had been received, and the comprehensive 

 abuse lavished by Aunt Tish upon Charlotte, were at first 

 sufficient to make her forget the frouziness of the dining- 

 room, and the fact that she had to share a bedroom with 

 her cousins, the two Misses Fitzpatrick. Francie had kept 

 the particulars of her fight with Charlotte to herself Per- 

 haps she felt that it would not be easy to make the position 



