all. She had been
willing to admit that to lounge in the streets so late had, perhaps,
looked strange. It was an admission very simple, and not at all galling.
Against the use of the word 'pitch' to describe Gina Lunelli and Luli
(she had quite missed any ambiguity there might be in its use, and had
accepted, naturally, the assumption, put forward on the surface, that
Tommy and she were the touchers, who might be defiled) she had
protested:

'You see, we're all quite the same sort of people--Tommy and I and they.
There's no difference. You can't--you can't separate us.'

Retrospect remarked that Mrs. Venables had not really, with any great
determination, tried to do so.

Yet even then Betty's words had seemed to imply that she had begun,
however vaguely, to discriminate between one 'sort of person' and
another. Retrospect now completed that discrimination. Retrospect gave
her, in plain language, the kernel, so carefully wrapped up, which Mrs.
Venables had thought she could scarcely have missed. It was laid now in
her hands for her to look at; she looked at it, missing nothing.

Retrospect pushed Mrs. Venables aside, having quite elucidated her, and
showed in turn Warren. It painted him outside the theatre, in a
difficult position--the Essingtons and his mother on one side of the
picture, Gina and Luli and Betty Crevequer on the other. The picture was
not without its instructiveness. In an awkward position Warren had
relied, with the careless confidence his cousin termed insolent, on the
obtuseness which saw nothing. His confidence was justified; the
obtuseness had still seen nothing. He had not, probably, taken
retrospect into account, or he might have adopted another course; he
might either have turned his back on the Essingtons and his mother, or
even--but this would hardly have been feasible--have introduced his
companions into their company. In the course he did take, the Essingtons
thought he showed good taste and a proper sense of the fitness of
things.

Gina and Luli and Betty were no authorities on taste or the fitness of
things.

Warren was everywhere; retrospect, exploiting him, never came to an end.
It was strange, it was marvellous, how it was possible to miss
things--things that so stared one in the face. Yet, how should one have
known? There was no reason why one should know now; only the slow
pervasion of atmosphere, that enabled one to look at things with such
strangely new eyes, the eyes, doubtl