And on the days when she came home boozed she stammered that it was all through grief.

But honest folks shrugged their shoulders.

They knew what that meant: ascribing the effects of the peppery fire of l'Assommoir to grief, indeed! At all events, she ought to have called it bottled grief.

No doubt at the beginning she couldn't digest Nana's flight.

All the honest feelings remaining in her revolted at the thought, and besides, as a rule a mother doesn't like to have to think that her daughter, at that very moment, perhaps, is being familiarly addressed by the first chance comer.