by Stevie with his usual
docility. It flattered him. He raised his head and threw out his chest.

"Don't be nervous, Winnie. Mustn't be nervous! 'Bus all right," he
answered in a brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the timorousness of
a child and the resolution of a man. He advanced fearlessly with the
woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped. Nevertheless, on the
pavement of the squalid and wide thoroughfare, whose poverty in all the
amenities of life stood foolishly exposed by a mad profusion of
gas-lights, their resemblance to each other was so pronounced as to
strike the casual passers-by.

Before the doors of the public-house at the corner, where the profusion
of gas-light reached the height of positive wickedness, a four-wheeled
cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the box, seemed cast out
into the gutter on account of irremediable decay. Mrs Verloc recognised
the conveyance. Its aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a
perfection of grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it
were the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion
of a woman for a horse (when she is not sitting behind him), exclaimed
vaguely:

"Poor brute:"

Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon his
sister.

"Poor! Poor!" he ejaculated appreciatively. "Cabman poor too. He told
me himself."

The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame him. Jostled,
but obstinate, he would remain there, trying to express the view newly
opened to his sympathies of the human and equine misery in close
association. But it was very difficult. "Poor brute, poor people!" was
all he could repeat. It did not seem forcible enough, and he came to a
stop with an angry splutter: "Shame!" Stevie was no master of phrases,
and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and
precision. But he felt with greater completeness and some profundity.
That little word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one
sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other--at the
poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor
kids at home. And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten. He knew it from
experience. It was a bad world. Bad! Bad!

Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not pretend
to such depths of insight. Moreover, she had not experienced the magic
of the cabman's eloquence. S