elves, and many of whom had
acquired a precocious suspicion of Greeks bearing gifts. Insall himself
had used the phrase, and explained it to Janet. That sense of caveat
donor was perhaps their most pathetic characteristic. But he broke it
down; broke down, too, the shyness accompanying it, the shyness and
solemnity emphasized in them by contact with hardship and poverty, with
the stark side of life they faced at home. He had made them--Mrs. Maturin
once illuminatingly remarked--more like children. Sometimes he went to
see their parents,--as in the case of Marcus--to suggest certain hygienic
precautions in his humorous way; and his accounts of these visits, too,
were always humorous. Yet through that humour ran a strain of pathos that
clutched--despite her smile--at Janet's heartstrings. This gift of
emphasizing and heightening tragedy while apparently dealing in comedy
she never ceased to wonder at. She, too, knew that tragedy of the
tenements, of the poor, its sordidness and cruelty. All her days she had
lived precariously near it, and lately she had visited these people, had
been torn by the sight of what they endured. But Insall's jokes, while
they stripped it of sentimentality of which she had an instinctive
dislike--made it for her even more poignant. One would have thought, to
have such an insight into it, that he too must have lived it, must have
been brought up in some dirty alley of a street. That gift, of course,
must be a writer's gift.

When she saw the waifs trooping after him down the stairs, Mrs. Maturin
called him the Pied Piper of Hampton.

As time went on, Janet sometimes wondered over the quiet manner in which
these two people, Insall and Mrs. Maturin, took her visits as though they
were matters of course, and gave her their friendship. There was, really,
no obvious excuse for her coming, not even that of the waifs for
food--and yet she came to be fed. The sustenance they gave her would have
been hard to define; it flowed not so much from what they said, as from
what they were; it was in the atmosphere surrounding them. Sometimes she
looked at Mrs. Maturin to ask herself what this lady would say if she
knew her history, her relationship with Ditmar--which had been her real
reason for entering the ranks of the strikers. And was it fair for her,
Janet, to permit Mrs. Maturin to bestow her friendship without revealing
this? She could not make up her mind as to what this lady would say.
Janet had had no