it,
whether it was sick or well, clean or dirty, gave him pleasure that when
he thought about it too much became as poignant as pain. For there was
nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do for Winny to repay her. He
did not know that Winny paid herself in a thousand inimitable
sensations every time she touched the things that he had touched, or
that belonged to him; that with every stitch she put into his poor
clothes her fingers satisfied their longing, as it were, in an
attenuated, reiterated caress; that to feel the silken flesh of his
child against her flesh was for Winny to know motherhood.

Her life had in it the wonder and beauty and mystery of religion. All
the religion that she knew was in each service that she did for Ranny in
his house. Acacia Avenue, with its tufted trees, with its rows of absurd
and pathetic and diminutive villas, was for Winny a shining walk between
heavenly mansions. She handled each one of Ranny's prize cups as if it
had been the Holy Grail.

And religion went hand in hand with an exquisite iniquity. In all that
she did there was something unsanctioned, something that gave her the
secret and essential thrill of sin. When Winny made that beefsteak pie
for Ranny she had her first taste of fearful, delicious, illegitimate
joy. For it was not right that she should be there making beefsteak pies
for Ranny. It was Violet who should have been making beefsteak pies. But
once plunged in Winny couldn't stop. She went on till she had mended all
Ranny's clothes and sewed new Poly. ribbon on all the vests he ran in.
She loved those vests more than anything he wore. They belonged to the
old splendid Ranny who had once been hers.

And under it all (if she had cared to justify herself), under the
mystery and the beauty and the wonder, there was the sound, practical
common sense of it all. As long as Violet was comfortable with Ranny
she would stay with him. But she would not be comfortable if she had too
many things to do; and if she became uncomfortable she would leave him;
and if she left him Ranny would be unhappy. So that the more you did for
her the more likely she was to keep straight. Keeping Violet straight
had always been Winny's job; it always would be; and she was more than
ever bound to stick to it now that it meant keeping Ranny's home
together. In Winny's eyes the breaking up of a home was the most awful
thing that could happen on this earth. In Leonard Mercier (established
so dang