Brigg was
filled with an anger that seemed to her as righteous as the anger of a
Puritan against Museum-opening on Sunday. Her ground-floor lodger was
going to the bad. Analysed, reduced to its essence, that was her feeling
about the lady of the feathers. Cuckoo had lived at number 400 for a
considerable time. Being, in some ways, easy-going, or perhaps one should
say rather reckless, she had given herself with a good enough grace to be
plucked by the claws of the landlady. She had endured being ruthlessly
rooked, with but little murmuring, as do so many of her patient class,
accustomed to be the prey of each unit in the large congregation of the
modern Fates. For months and years she had paid a preposterous price for
her badly furnished little rooms. She had been overcharged habitually for
every morsel of food she ate, every drop of beer or of tea she drank,
every fire that was kindled in her badly cleaned grate, every candle that
lighted her, almost every match she struck. She and Mrs. Brigg had had
many rows, had, times without number, lifted up their respective voices
in vituperation, and shown command of large and vile vocabularies. But
these rows had not been on the occasion of the open cheating of the
former by the latter.
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