Never before in her wanderings had she got so completely in touch with her surroundings.
But from habit she always talked of moving.

She could never pass an empty house without going through it, sniffing the drains, and requesting the landlord to make certain improvements, with the mania of women who haunt the shops with empty purses, pricing expensive materials.

Every week she announced to Chook and Pinkey that she had found the very house, if William would take a day off to move.

But in her heart she had no desire to leave the neighbourhood.

It was an agreeable and daily diversion for her to run up to the shop, and prophesy ruin and disaster to Chook and Pinkey for taking a shop that had beggared the last tenant, ignoring the fact that Jack Ryan had converted his profits into beer.