Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just like a hare. So she does still, but she’s got very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes, and when she’s more upset than usual she’s got a trick of humping her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gypsy woman over her fire. She one’s of those people who get their main kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only petty disasters, of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines and revolutions, she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up, and the gas-bill is enormous, and the kids’ boots are wearing out and there’s another instalment due on the radio – that’s Hilda’s litany. She gets what I’ve finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rocking herself to and fro with her arms across her breast and glooming at me, ‘But, George, it’s very serious! I don’t know what we’re going to do! I don’t know where the money’s coming from! You don’t seem to realise how serious it is!’ and so on and so forth. It’s fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in the workhouse. The funny thing is that if we ever do get to the workhouse Hilda won’t mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact she’ll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.