single purpose and of a noble unity of
inspiration, like those rare lives that have left their mark on the
thoughts and feelings of mankind. But the visions of Mrs Verloc lacked
nobility and magnificence. She saw herself putting the boy to bed by the
light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a "business house,"
dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut
glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious
splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions. She
remembered brushing the boy's hair and tying his pinafores--herself in a
pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared
creature by another creature nearly as small but not quite so badly
scared; she had the vision of the blows intercepted (often with her own
head), of a door held desperately shut against a man's rage (not for very
long); of a poker flung once (not very far), which stilled that
particular storm into the dumb and awful silence which follows a
thunder-clap. And all these scenes of violence came and went accompanied
by the unrefined noise of deep vociferations proceeding from a man
wounded in his paternal pride, declaring himself obviously accursed since
one of his kids was a "slobbering idjut and the other a wicked
she-devil." It was of her that this had been said many years ago.

Mrs Verloc heard the words again in a ghostly fashion, and then the
dreary shadow of the Belgravian mansion descended upon her shoulders. It
was a crushing memory, an exhausting vision of countless breakfast trays
carried up and down innumerable stairs, of endless haggling over pence,
of the endless drudgery of sweeping, dusting, cleaning, from basement to
attics; while the impotent mother, staggering on swollen legs, cooked in
a grimy kitchen, and poor Stevie, the unconscious presiding genius of all
their toil, blacked the gentlemen's boots in the scullery. But this
vision had a breath of a hot London summer in it, and for a central
figure a young man wearing his Sunday best, with a straw hat on his dark
head and a wooden pipe in his mouth. Affectionate and jolly, he was a
fascinating companion for a voyage down the sparkling stream of life;
only his boat was very small. There was room in it for a girl-partner at
the oar, but no accommodation for passengers. He was allowed to drift
away from the threshold of the Belgravian mansion while Winnie averted
her tearful eyes