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Updated: May 18, 2025
In a long experience of gentlemen lodgers, Mrs Verloc’s mother had acquired a dismal but resigned notion of the fantastic side of human nature. What if Mr Verloc suddenly took it into his head to tell Stevie to take his blessed sticks somewhere out of that? A division, on the other hand, however carefully made, might give some cause of offence to Winnie.
Stevie called her Auntie Nan, now; but Annie said simply Nan. Margaret had adopted it as well. Hannah was rather awkward and old-fashioned. Even Ben sometimes warbled, "Nannie, wilt thou gang wi' me?" She had another great and unexpected treat a few weeks later. She had gone on Friday to make a real visit at Dolly's, and go from there to school on Monday morning.
He was about to answer her at last with the passion she was trying to provoke, when a soft little cheek was pressed against his downcast head, and little Nan lisped in her broken words, 'Me sleepy, Stevie; me say "Our Father," and go to bed.
During these absences Mrs Verloc, becoming acutely aware of the vacant place at her right hand, missed her mother very much, and stared stonily; while Stevie, from the same reason, kept on shuffling his feet, as though the floor under the table were uncomfortably hot.
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. She was in the dark as to the inwardness of the word “Shame.” And she said placidly: “Come along, Stevie. You can’t help that.”
"Mean you're goin' to give me an even break?" But Bill Royce, fairly trembling with an eagerness strange to him, had clutched at Steve's arm, had found it, was holding him back, crying out excitedly: "You're a good pal, Stevie; you're the best pal as ever was an' I know it! Didn't I always know you'd be like this?
Before the door of one of these tiny houses—one without a light in the little downstairs window—the cab had come to a standstill. Mrs Verloc’s mother got out first, backwards, with a key in her hand. Winnie lingered on the flagstone path to pay the cabman. Stevie, after helping to carry inside a lot of small parcels, came out and stood under the light of a gas-lamp belonging to the Charity.
Thus they discussed on familiar lines the bearings of a new situation. And the cab jolted. Mrs Verloc’s mother expressed some misgivings. Could Stevie be trusted to come all that way alone? Winnie maintained that he was much less “absent-minded” now. They agreed as to that. It could not be denied. Much less—hardly at all. They shouted at each other in the jingle with comparative cheerfulness.
She had to go and say good-bye to Stevie, who was just too sweet for anything, and Annie, and dark-eyed Daisy Hoffman. It was queer up at West Farms, delightful, too. The house was old, with a hall through the middle, and a Dutch door just as there was up at Yonkers. The top part was opened in the morning, sometimes the whole door.
The cabman, short and broad, eyed him with his fierce little eyes that seemed to smart in a clear and corroding liquid. “’Ard on ’osses, but dam’ sight ’arder on poor chaps like me,” he wheezed just audibly. “Poor! Poor!” stammered out Stevie, pushing his hands deeper into his pockets with convulsive sympathy.
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