The Expensive Halo by Josephine Tey — Read

Tea at Seventeen Sark Street was over. Mr. Ellis had opened the evening paper, settled himself comfortable in "his" chair (the only really comfortably one in the room) and would for the next half-hour cease to examine the consciences of his children while he absorbed the fascinating details of the latest murder. When he had finished he would re-live the pleasant sensations which these details roused in him by holding forth to his wife on the iniquity of the world, while she sat mending his shirts. It annoyed him sometimes that his wife had to get up so often to see about the cooking of Dastur's supper; it stopped him in the middle of his best periods quite often.

Mrs. Ellis was, at the moment, in the kitchen washing up the tea things, and Sara, who usually helped to wash up, was crying on the dark stairs of the second flight, having been too discouraged and weary to climb any further. She had had a row with her mother. The tablecloth at tea had not been over clean, and she had been outspoken about it. Her mother had pointed out that if she had to wash the tablecloths she mightn't be so particular. "But _you_ don't have to wash them!" she had cried. "That's what I'm complaining about. Between us all we surely make enough to pay for the laundry of more than two cloths a week." She had tried to hit at her father, and had merely hurt her mother. She might have known that her father wouldn't see any reason why her mother shouldn't do the washing at home. He had held forth about the "good home that was provided for her" and her "thanklessness." Her father had never been able to be relevant. He had a mind like an idiot's; a silly, theatrical mind. She had answered back, had wrangled with him, conscious all the time of the angry, discouraged look on her mother's face. Sara hated a row. She felt unclean after one. It was a betrayal of something in herself; she loathed herself for having taken part in one. This was the second time this week that she had lost hold of herself. She must be getting run down. When things got on top of you it usually meant that you were run down. That week at Brighton in May was a long time away. And it was still a long time to those three days at Christmas. Perhaps she should try a tonic of some sort. But it was very hard to spend your money on tonics when it was so difficult to keep yourself in silk stockings, even at trade prices.