Yet the Roxbury Russets and Baldwins of that orchard had once been Billy Jacobs's great pride, the one point of hospitality which his miserliness never conquered.

Long after it would have broken his heart to set out a generous dinner for a neighbor, he would feast him on choice apples, and send him away with a big basket full in his hands.

Now every passing school-boy helped himself to the wan, withered, and scanty fruit; and nobody had thought it worth while to mend the dilapidated fences which might have helped to shut them out.
Even Mrs.White, with all her indifference to externals, rebelled at first at the idea of going to live in the old Jacobs house.
"I'll never go there, Stephen," she said petulantly.

"I'm not going to live in half a house with the mill people; and it's no better than a barn, the hideous, old, faded, yellow thing!" If it crossed Stephen's mind that there was a touch of late retribution in his mother's having come at last to a sense of suffering because she must live in an unsightly house, he did not betray it.
He replied very gently.

He was never heard to speak other than gently to his mother, though to every one else his manner was sometimes brusque and dictatorial.
"But, mother, I think we must.