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Updated: May 13, 2025
His aunt kept house for him, and his nieces and nephews overran the place. There was always a raft of them there, either coming or going; and the way they exploited him! He supported them all; heaven knew how many there were; such drabs and gawks, all elbows and knees, who soaked themselves with cologne and made companions of the servants.
He is still in great demand, and may command from sixty to seventy pounds per annum, with rations, cow's milk, free hut, and a portion of produce of stock in addition to all, if he chooses to put his wages to that mode of profit. Women servants were formerly much wanted. They are now at a discount. The filthy drabs ejected from Ireland are scarcely worth their meat.
There was something sardonic, almost sinister, in its appearance of having deliberately "made up" for its anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs and browns, with a carpet and paper that nobody would remember, and chairs and tables as impersonal as railway porters. Darrow picked up the time-table and tossed it on to the table. Then he rose to his feet, lit a cigar and went to the window.
"Their duns and drabs, their russets and tawny tones of red and orange, are of their environment, the proper skins for their bodies; but to think of that girl brightening the eyes of a hundred louts by virtue of those fine feathers!
'It's a long time, said Mr. Bumble. 'Very good. I've done it. 'The scene, the workhouse. 'Good! 'And the time, night. 'Yes. 'And the place, the crazy hole, wherever it was, in which miserable drabs brought forth the life and health so often denied to themselves gave birth to puling children for the parish to rear; and hid their shame, rot 'em in the grave!
One pleasant-looking old gentleman whose face shone under a broad brim, and whose cleanly drabs were brought into distasteful proximity with the garments of a drunken coal-heaver, after a vain effort to edge away, relieved his mind by turning to his neighbor with the statement, "Consistency is a jewel." "Undoubtedly true, Mr. Greenleaf," answered the neighbor, "but what caused the remark?"
He wore a pretty large wig, which had once been white, but was now of a brownish yellow; his coat was one of those modest-coloured drabs which mock the injuries of dust and dirt; two jack-boots concealed, in part, the well-mended knees of an old pair of buckskin breeches; while the spotted handkerchief round his neck preserved at once its owner from catching cold and his neck-cloth from being dirtied.
At first they merely made the round of the room, looking at the drabs who were jumping about. But one evening, as they had some coin, they sat down and ordered a large bowl of hot wine in view of regaling themselves and waiting to see if Nana would turn up.
His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more. She had suffered so much without complaint at first, when she had seen him going after all the village drabs, and when a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted.
It is true that a certain candour of conduct distinguished her from the frowsy drabs with whom she must have jostled in public-house bars or rubbed elbows at lodging-house doors, a sort of unconsciousness of evil, which I take to have been due to an entire absence of a moral sense. It is probable that she was not a miserable sinner because she did not know what was miserable sin.
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