to appreciate the
generosity of this restraint.

"It isn't that he doesn't work as well as ever," she continued. "He's
been making himself very useful. You'd think he couldn't do enough for
us."

Mr Verloc directed a casual and somnolent glance at Stevie, who sat on
his right, delicate, pale-faced, his rosy mouth open vacantly. It was
not a critical glance. It had no intention. And if Mr Verloc thought
for a moment that his wife's brother looked uncommonly useless, it was
only a dull and fleeting thought, devoid of that force and durability
which enables sometimes a thought to move the world. Leaning back, Mr
Verloc uncovered his head. Before his extended arm could put down the
hat Stevie pounced upon it, and bore it off reverently into the kitchen.
And again Mr Verloc was surprised.

"You could do anything with that boy, Adolf," Mrs Verloc said, with her
best air of inflexible calmness. "He would go through fire for you.
He--"

She paused attentive, her ear turned towards the door of the kitchen.

There Mrs Neale was scrubbing the floor. At Stevie's appearance she
groaned lamentably, having observed that he could be induced easily to
bestow for the benefit of her infant children the shilling his sister
Winnie presented him with from time to time. On all fours amongst the
puddles, wet and begrimed, like a sort of amphibious and domestic animal
living in ash-bins and dirty water, she uttered the usual exordium: "It's
all very well for you, kept doing nothing like a gentleman." And she
followed it with the everlasting plaint of the poor, pathetically
mendacious, miserably authenticated by the horrible breath of cheap rum
and soap-suds. She scrubbed hard, snuffling all the time, and talking
volubly. And she was sincere. And on each side of her thin red nose her
bleared, misty eyes swam in tears, because she felt really the want of
some sort of stimulant in the morning.

In the parlour Mrs Verloc observed, with knowledge:

"There's Mrs Neale at it again with her harrowing tales about her little
children. They can't be all so little as she makes them out. Some of
them must be big enough by now to try to do something for themselves. It
only makes Stevie angry."

These words were confirmed by a thud as of a fist striking the kitchen
table. In the normal evolution of his sympathy Stevie had become angry
on discovering that he had no shilling in his pocket. In his inability
to relieve at once Mrs Nea