of exasperation.  And she would ask him to come home with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her.  At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head.  For he was still not quite sure ... and he feared that he might become so if he went back and lived with her.  As things were, he could interpret her prompt answer to his call as a sign of affection.  Moreover, he had his poor little pride, which was not a negligible quality; he never would have sent to her for money if he had not felt so sorry for his landladies.  To admit that he could not earn a bare living when his brother was making himself one of the lords of the earth would have broken his spirit.

Knowing these things, she could not beg him over-much to come to her, but that left dreadfully little to say in the hours they had to spend together on these occasions.  There fell increasingly moments of silence when, unreminded by his piteousness and her obligations by the good little pipe of her voice, she was aware of nothing but his unpleasantness.  For he was becoming more and more physically horrible.  As was natural when he lived in these mean lodgings, he was beginning to look, if not actually dirty, at least unwashed; and there was something else about his appearance, something tarnished and disgraceful, which she could not understand till the landlady at Leicester said to her:  “I do think it’s such a pity that a nice young man like Mr. Peacey sometimes don’t take more care of himself like he ought to.”  Drunkenness seemed to her worse than anything in the world, because it meant the surrender of dignity; she would rather have had her son a murderer than a drunkard.  She had wondered if the truth need ever reach Richard, and there had floated before her mind’s eye a newspaper paragraph:  “Roger Peacey, described as a clerk, fined forty shillings for being drunk and disorderly and obstructing the police in the course of their duty....”  She had asked quickly, “What is he like?  Does he get violent?” The woman had answered:  “Oh no, mum; just silly-like,” and had laughed, evidently at the recollection of some ridiculous scene.

Oh God, oh God!  When she struggled out of her bad dreams she awoke to something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear, but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil.  She had always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour.  There was somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard’s mother and him for daring to be Richard—­an intention that was vindictive against beauty and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice.  It could not strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit for destruction.  Now they had become tainted.  She knew that Roger’s drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she