And as we reckon up the disturbing influences that were stirring Lady Harman out of that life of acquiescences to which women are perhaps even more naturally disposed than men, we may pick out the conversation of Susan Burnet as something a little apart from the others, as something with a peculiar¹ barbed pointedness² of its own that was yet in other respects very representative of a multitude of nudges and nips and pricks³ and indications that life was giving Lady Harman's awaking mind. Susan Burnet was a woman who came to renovate⁴ and generally do up the Putney curtains and furniture and loose covers every spring; she was Mrs. Crumble's discovery, she was sturdy and short and she had open blue eyes and an engaging simplicity⁵ of manner that attracted Lady Harman from the outset. She was stuck away in one of the spare bedrooms and there she was available for any one, so long, she explained, as they didn't fluster⁶ her when she was cutting out, with a flow of conversation that not even a mouth full of pins seemed to interrupt. And Lady Harman would go and watch Susan Burnet by the hour together and think what an enviably independent young woman she was, and listen with interest and something between horror and admiration⁸ to the various impressions of life she had gathered during a hardy⁹ and adventurous¹⁰ career.  
Their early conversations were about Susan Burnet's business and the general condition of things in that world of upholsterers' young women in which Susan had lived until she perceived the possibilities of a "connexion," and set up for herself. And the condition of things in that world, as Susan described it, brought home to Lady Harman just how sheltered and limited her own upbringing had been. "It isn't right," said Susan, "the way they send girls out with fellers into empty houses. Naturally the men get persecuting¹¹ them. They don't seem hardly able to help it, some of them, and I will say this for them, that a lot of the girls go more than half way with them, leading them on. Still there's a sort of man won't leave you alone. One I used to be sent out with and a married man too he was, Oh!—he used to give me a time. Why I've bit his hands before now, bit hard, before he'd leave go of me. It's my opinion the married men are worse than the single. Bolder they are. I pushed him over a scuttle¹² once and he hit his head against a bookcase. I was fair frightened of him. 'You little devil,' he says; 'I'll be even with you yet....' Oh! I've been called worse things than that.... Of course a respectable girl gets through with it, but it's trying and to some it's a sort of temptation...."
 
"I should have thought," reflected Lady Harman, "you could have told someone."
 
"It's queer," said Susan; "but it never seemed to me the sort of thing a girl ought to go telling. It's a kind of private thing. And besides, it isn't exactly easy to tell.... I suppose the Firm didn't want to be worried by complaints and disputes about that sort of thing. And it isn't always easy to say just which of the two is to blame."
 
"But how old are the girls they send out?" asked Lady Harman.
 
"Some's as young as seventeen or eighteen. It all depends on the sort of work that's wanted to be done...."
 
"Of course a lot of them have to marry...."
 
This lurid¹³ little picture of vivid happenings in unoccupied houses and particularly of the prim¹⁴, industrious¹⁵, capable Susan Burnet, biting aggressive wrists, stuck in Lady Harman's imagination. She seemed to be looking into hitherto unsuspected pits of simple and violent living just beneath her feet. Susan told some upholsteress love tales, real love tales, with a warmth and honesty of passion in them that seemed at once dreadful and fine to Lady Harman's underfed imagination. Under encouragement Susan expanded the picture, beyond these mere¹⁶ glimpses of workshop and piece-work and furtive¹⁷ lust⁷. It appeared that she was practically the head of her family; there was a mother who had specialized¹⁸ in ill-health, a sister of defective¹⁹ ability who stayed at home, a brother in South Africa who was very good and sent home money, and three younger sisters growing up. And father,—she evaded²⁰ the subject of father at first. Then presently Lady Harman had some glimpses of an earlier phase in Susan Burnet's life "before any of us were earning money." Father appeared as a kindly²¹, ineffectual, insolvent²² figure struggling to conduct a baker²³'s and confectioner's business in Walthamstow, mother was already specializing, there were various brothers and sisters being born and dying. "How many were there of you altogether?" asked Lady Harman.
 
"Thirteen there was. Father always used to laugh and say he'd had a fair baker's dozen. There was Luke to begin with——"
 
Susan began to count on her fingers and recite braces²⁵ of scriptural names.
 
She could only make up her tale to twelve. She became perplexed²⁶. Then she remembered. "Of course!" she cried: "there was Nicodemus. He was still-born. I always forget Nicodemus, poor little chap! But he came—was it sixth or seventh?—seventh after Anna."
 
She gave some glimpses of her father and then there was a collapse²⁷ of which she fought shy. Lady Harman was too delicate to press her to talk of that.
 
But one day in the afternoon Susan's tongue ran.
 
She was telling how first she went to work before she was twelve.
 
"But I thought the board schools——" said Lady Harman.
 
"I had to go before the committee," said Susan. "I had to go before the committee and ask to be let go to work. There they was, sitting round a table in a great big room, and they was as kind as anything, one old gentleman with a great white beard, he was as kind as could be. 'Don't you be frightened, my dear,' he says. 'You tell us why you want to go out working.' 'Well,' I says, 'somebody's got to earn something,' and that made them laugh in a sort of fatherly way, and after that there wasn't any difficulty. You see it was after Father's Inquest, and everybody was disposed to be kind to us. 'Pity they can't all go instead of this educational Tommy Rot,' the old gentleman says. 'You learn to work, my dear'—and I did...."
 
She paused.
 
"Father's inquest?" said Lady Harman.
 
Susan seemed to brace²⁴ herself to the occasion. "Father," she said, "was drowned. I know—I hadn't told you that before. He was drowned in the Lea. It's always been a distress²⁸ and humiliation²⁹ to us there had to be an Inquest. And they threw out things.... It's why we moved to Haggerston. It's the worst that ever happened to us in all our lives. Far worse. Worse than having the things sold or the children with scarlet³⁰ fever and having to burn everything.... I don't like to talk about it. I can't help it but I don't....
 
"I don't know why I talk to you as I do, Lady Harman, but I don't seem to mind talking to you. I don't suppose I've opened my mouth to anyone about it, not for years—except to one dear friend I've got—her who persuaded me to be a church member. But what I've always said and what I will always say is this, that I don't believe any evil of Father, I don't believe, I won't ever believe he took his life. I won't even believe he was in drink. I don't know how he got in the river, but I'm certain it wasn't so. He was a weak man, was Father, I've never denied he was a weak man. But a harder working man than he was never lived. He worried, anyone would have worried seeing the worries he had. The shop wasn't paying as it was; often we never tasted meat for weeks together, and then there came one of these Internationals, giving overweight and underselling...."
 
"One of these Internationals?"
 
"Yes, I don't suppose you've ever heard of them. They're in the poorer neighbourhoods chiefly. They sell teas and things mostly now but they began as bakers³¹' shops and what they did was to come into a place and undersell until all the old shops were ruined and shut up. That was what they tried to do and Father hadn't no more chance amongst them than a mouse in a trap.... It was just like being run over. All the trade that stayed with us after a bit was Bad Debts. You can't blame people I suppose for going where they get more and pay less, and it wasn't till we'd all gone right away to Haggerston that they altered things and put the prices up again. Of course Father lost heart and all that. He didn't know what to do, he'd sunk all he had in the shop; he just sat and moped about. Really,—he was pitiful. He wasn't able to sleep; he used to get up at nights and go about downstairs. Mother says she found him once sweeping³² out the bakehouse at two o'clock in the morning. He got it into his head that getting up like that would help him. But I don't believe and I won't believe he wouldn't have seen it through if he could. Not to my dying day will I believe that...."
 
Lady Harman reflected. "But couldn't he have got work again—as a baker?"
 
"It's hard after you've had a shop. You see all the younger men've come on. They know the new ways. And a man who's had a shop and failed, he's lost heart. And these stores setting up make everything drivinger. They do things a different way. They make it harder for everyone."
 
Both Lady Harman and Susan Burnet reflected in silence for a few seconds upon the International Stores. The sewing woman was the first to speak.
 
"Things like that," she said, "didn't ought to be. One shop didn't ought to be allowed to set out to ruin another. It isn't fair trading, it's a sort of murder. It oughtn't to be allowed. How was father to know?..."
 
"There's got to be competition," said Lady Harman.
 
"I don't call that competition," said Susan Burnet.
 
"But,—I suppose they give people cheaper bread."
 
"They do for a time. Then when they've killed you they do what they like.... Luke—he's one of those who'll say anything—well, he used to say it was a regular Monopoly. But it's hard on people who've set out to live honest and respectable and bring up a family plain and decent to be pushed out of the way like that."
 
"I suppose it is," said Lady Harman.
 
"What was father to do?" said Susan, and turned to Sir Isaac's armchair from which this discourse³³ had distracted her.
 
And then suddenly, in a voice thick with rage, she burst out: "And then Alice must needs go and take their money. That's what sticks in my throat."
 
Still on her knees she faced about to Lady Harman.
 
"Alice goes into one of their Ho'burn branches as a waitress, do what I could to prevent her. It makes one mad to think of it. Time after time I've said to her, 'Alice,' I've said, 'sooner than touch their dirty money I'd starve in the street.' And she goes! She says it's all nonsense of me to bear a spite. Laughs at me! 'Alice,' I told her, 'it's a wonder the spirit of poor father don't rise up against you.' And she laughs. Calls that bearing a spite.... Of course she was little when it happened. She can't remember, not as I remember...."
 
Lady Harman reflected for a time. "I suppose you don't know," she began, addressing Susan's industrious back; "you don't know who—who owns these International Stores?"
 
"I suppose it's some company," said Sus............