Explore "The Expensive Halo" by Josephine Tey on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Tea at number seventeen Sark Street was ostensibly at half-past six on week days. In reality it was at the moment when Mr. Ellis arrived home. If the members of his family arrived before him they waited for their meal, no matter how tired and hungry they might be, until he arrived. If, on the other hand, he arrived first, tea was set on the table with the utmost dispatch, and his family, as they dribbled in, retrieved their fish or sausage from the gas oven. As children this had seemed to them the appropriate and fitting thing; they had taken it as a matter of course; not because their father was the bread-winner, but because he was Father. As one by one they became breadwinners, however, and self-respect and independence rose in them, there was muted grumbling, and Sara, always the kicker against pricks, had first uttered that unspeakable heresy: "Father's selfishness." Inwardly dismayed but outwardly forbidding, their mother had subdued them. Mary Ellis would allow none of her brood to criticise their father. Another woman would have snubbed them and forbidden the subject.
Mary took to cooking each person's share as they came in and having her own tea in snatches, so that her family, exasperated and beaten, ordered her to stop it, and thereafter fetched their share from the oven with as good a grace as they could muster. The only exception to the rule was Matt, the eldest. Matt had slipped from under his father's jurisdiction in one adroit movement by becoming a reporter on the _Daily Clarion_. As a newspaper man, his hours were incalculable, and no one could call him a liar when he said he was on a job. He had meals when he came in, could never go to Wednesday night prayer meeting (a fact which his baffled and angry parent assured him would inevitably lead him to hell), and very often managed to absent himself from even the Sunday meetings, an achievement which in the Ellis family was equivalent to an escape from Dartmoor together with the presentation of the freedom of the City of London.