he returned from seeing Winky
home. (So much was permitted him. It was even imperative.)

"Did they ever cry like that for their Mammy?"

He smiled grimly. His illumination was more than he could bear.

CHAPTER XXVI

It was in the cruelty of it, in that sudden barbarous tearing of the
children from Winny, of Winny from Ransome, and of Ransome from his
home, in that hurried, surreptitious flight through the darkness, that
he most felt the pressure and the malignant pinch of poverty. Owing to
his straitened circumstances, with all his mother's forethought and good
will, with all the combined resources of their ingenuity, they could do
no better to meet his lamentable case than this. "This," indeed, was
imperative, inevitable. He reflected bitterly that, if he had been a
rich man, like the manager or the secretary of Woolridge's, instead of a
ledger clerk (that was all that his last rise had made him) at a hundred
and fifty a year, he would have been spared "this." It would have been
neither inevitable nor imperative. It simply wouldn't have happened. He
would have had a house with a staff of competent servants, a nurse for
the children, a cook, and maybe a housemaid to manage for him, and so
forth. Winny wouldn't have come into it. It would never have occurred to
her to run the risks she had run for him. There would have been no need.
She would have remained, serene, beautiful in sympathy, outside his
calamity, untouched by its sordidness, its taint. All the machinery of
his household would have gone on in spite of it, without any hitch or
dislocation, working all the more smoothly in the absence of its
mistress.

That was how rich people came out of this sort of thing, right side up,
smiling, knowing as they did that there was nothing to spoil the peace
of it for them, or make them apt to mistake it for anything but the
blessing that it was. Thus they got, as you may say, the whole good out
of it without any waste. At the worst, if they didn't like it, rich
people, driven to flight, depart from the scene of their disaster with
dignity, in cabs.

But Ranny's departure, with all its ignominy, was not by any means the
worst. The worst, incomparably, was the going back on Monday evening to
settle up. There was a man coming from Wandsworth with a handcart for
the cots, the high chair and all the babies' furniture, and the kids'
toys and the little clothes, their whole diminutive outfit, and for what
he needed o