Life was now timeless, without the clock of man’s habits.  Nothing mattered.

She sat down idly before her dressing-table and met again her sallowed face in the mirror.  The sight stirred her anger vigorously once more.  Wrathfully she wanted to do something—­anything—­and, to keep her fingers busy, pulled open one of the top drawers of the dressing-table.  Confusion met her, for it was the untidy drawer beloved of woman; the drawer where ribbons and lace and scent sachets and waist-belts and flowers and face powder lay pell-mell.  For a long while the drawer had not had the periodical setting straight which woman grants it, and its contents were aged, dingy and undesirable—­camisole-ribbons like boot-strings, lace collars long out of fashion, a rose or two crumpled into flat and withered blobs, shapeless and faded.  She touched things sorrowfully.

“My pretty things!” she thought with regret.

At what precise moment the idea came to her she did not know, but it intruded by degrees.  She began to think idly of money, to turn over in her mind the exact allowance with which Osborn had left her, and she knew herself rich.  Till yesterday her domestic budget, for herself, the children and Osborn, had been at the rate of about one hundred and forty pounds a year.  He had to have the rest.  Now she had two hundred and no man to keep.  It would have taken a woman to understand why she suddenly sprang up, why her sallowed face took on a hasty colour, and with what an incredulously beating heart she hastened down the grey stone stairs to the hall-porter’s box.

“Porter,” she said, controlling her voice with difficulty, “I want a charwoman at once; and—­and for two or three hours every morning.  You could find one for me?”

Like every other block of flats, the place was infested with ladies of the charing profession, and he promised her one within half an hour.  Returning to her children, she sat down at ease in the dining-room to await the woman’s arrival.

When she came, it was joy to show her round; to say:  “I want the bedroom and hall and kitchen done; these things washed up; and these vegetables prepared.  And these things of the children’s washed out, please.  I shall be back before you’ve finished.”

Then she put on the children’s outdoor things, established the baby and the three-year-old at either end of the perambulator and, with George walking manfully by her side, set out upon an errand.

She was going to tell her mother of what had befallen; she hardly knew why, but the wisdom of matronly counsel and opinion, irritating as it was, had impressed her forcibly during the past years.  So she and George trundled the shabby grey perambulator, Rokeby’s gift, across the Heath, and along the intervening streets to Grannie Amber’s.