The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
else, for although all the clothes they wore during the day and all the old clothes and dresses in the house and even an old coloured table-cloth were put on the beds at night, they did not compensate for the blankets, and they were often unable to sleep on account of the intense cold.
A lady district visitor who called occasionally sometimes gave an order for a hundredweight of coal or a shilling's worth of groceries, or a ticket for a quart of soup which Elsie fetched in the evening from the Soup Kitchen. But this was not very often, because, as the lady said, there were so many cases similar to theirs that it was impossible to do more than a very little for any one of them.
Sometimes Mary became so weak and exhausted through overwork, worry and lack of proper food that she broke down altogether for the time being. Then she used to lie down on the bed in her room and cry.
On these occasions Elsie and Charley did the housework when they came home from school, made tea and toast for her, and brought it to her bedside.
The children rather enjoyed these times; the quiet and leisure were so different from other days when their mother was so busy she had no time to speak to them. They would sit on the side of the bed, the old grandmother in her chair opposite, and talk together about the future. Elsie said she was going to be a teacher and earn a lot of money to bring home to her mother to buy things with. Charley was thinking of opening a grocer's shop and having a horse and cart. When you have a grocer's shop, he said, there is always plenty to eat, for even if you have no money, you can take as much as you like out of your shop, good stuff too, tins of salmon, jam, sardines, eggs, cakes, biscuits and all those sorts of things. When delivering the groceries with the horse and cart, he went on, he would give rides to all the boys he knew; and in the summer-time, after the work was done and the shop shut up, Mother and Elsie and Granny could also come for long rides into the country.
The old grandmother, who had latterly become quite childish, would sit and listen to all this talk with a superior air. Sometimes she argued with the children about their plans, and ridiculed them. She used to say with a chuckle that she had heard people talk like that before, lots of times, but it never came to nothing in the end.
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