54 



STRAY- AW AYS 



long remained uncommiserated. She is one of the 

 Enghsh mothers who have uprooted themselves from 

 home and the tried and trusted suburban tradesmen, 

 to live in Paris with an art-student daughter, to create 

 for her a faint and famished semblance of the Kensing- 

 ton menage, to endure torments of anxiety about 



damp linen, to nourish for 

 the gargon of her hotel the 

 strongest hatred of her life. 

 The French of her peaceful 

 schoolroom days has little in 

 common with the clipped 

 commercial slang of her un- 

 congenial marketings, and at 

 this moment she suffers an 

 acute helplessness in the effort 

 to carry out her daughter's in- 

 structions about getting back 

 three sous, at least, in return 

 for an emptied bottle of alcool 

 a bruler. She can only, in com- 

 pulsory dumbness, accept the 

 fact that she receives nothing, 

 much as she has to submit 

 to the spectacle of Monsieur 

 Pouradoux's tall young man 

 rooting with his fat French fingers among the straw- 

 berries she is buying. She knows that when Ethel 

 comes back from the studio she will be displeased 

 about the three sous, and she feels culpable, but above 

 all things helpless. The workmen at a cabaret door 

 call out, " Oh yess ! Engleesh spokken ! " as she 

 passes with her discomfited face, and a boy thrusts 

 into her hand a gratuitously distributed supplement 

 of a halfpenny newspaper, with a coloured picture of 

 a decollete e lady breaking open a gi'ave. It seems to 



ONE OF A CLASS WHOSE SUFFER- 

 INGS HAVE TOO LONG REMAINED 

 UNCOMMISERATED 



