But he was quite willing that the half-crowns should now be taken direct to the man's wife and children, instead of passing from his hands to the public-house.

"Though really the good woman--for I understand she is a most excellent person--is singularly hard-favoured," my father added, "and looks more as if she thrashed old Ragged Robin than as if he beat her, as I hear he does." "Nothing inside, and the poker outside, makes a many women as they've no wish to sit for their picter," said Mrs.Bundle, severely, in reply to some remark of mine, reflecting, like my father's, on the said woman's appearance.

"And when a woman has children, and their father brings home nothing but kicks and bad language, in all reason if it isn't the death or the ruin of her, it makes her as she 'asn't much time nor spirits to spare for dropping curtseys and telling long tales like some people as is always scrap-seeking at gentry's back-doors.
But I knows a clean place when I takes it unawares, and clothes with more patch than stuff, and all the colour washed out of them, and bruises hid, and a bad husband made the best of, and children as knows how to behave themselves." The warmth of Mrs.Bundle's feelings only prompted me to tease her; and it was chiefly for "the fun of working her up" that I said-- "Ah, but, Nurse, you know we heard she went after him one night to the public-house, and made a row before everybody.

I don't mean he ought to go to the public-house, but still, I'm sure if I'd a wife who came and hunted me up when she thought I ought to be indoors, I'd--well, I'd try and teach her to stay at home.

Besides, women ought to be gentle, and perhaps if she were sweeter-tempered with him, he'd be kinder to her." "Do you know what she went for, Master Reginald ?" said Nurse Bundle.
"Not a halfpenny does he give her to feed the children with, and everything in that house that's got she gets by washing.