"'Oh, I donno,' I says; 'dirt gets to be apples--so be you plant 'em.' "But the Cadoza kitchen _was_ fearful. When we come through it, Mis' Cadoza was getting supper, and she'd woke up nameless smells of greasy things. There the bare table was piled with the inevitable mix-up of unwashed dishes that go along with the Mis' Cadozas of this world, so that you wonder how they ever got so much crockery together. There the floor wasn't swept, clothes was drying on a line over the stove, Spudge was eating his supper on the window-sill, and in his bed in the corner lay little Eph, so white and frail and queer-coloured that you felt you was looking on something bound not to last till much after you'd stopped looking. And there was Mis' Cadoza. When we had come through the kitchen, little Eph had said something glad at seeing Insley and hung hold of his hand and told him how he meant to model a clay Patsy, because it was Patsy, the dog, that had gone out in the dark and first brought Insley in to see him. "'An' when I'm big,' the child says, 'I'm going to make a clay _you_, Mr. Insley.' "Mis' Cadoza had turned round and bared up her crooked teeth. "'Don't you be impident!' she had said, raspish, throwing her hand out angular. "Mis' Cadoza was like somebody that hadn't got outside into the daylight of _Yet_. She was ignorant, blind to life, with some little bit of a corner of her brain working while the rest lay stock-still in her skull; unclean of person, the mother to no end of nameless horrors of habit--and her blood and the blood of some creature like her had been poured into that poor little boy, sickly, bloodless, not ready for the struggle. "'_Is_ there any use trying to do anything with anybody like that?' says Robin. "'_Is_ there?' says I, but I looked right straight at Christopher. If there wasn't no use trying to do anything with little Eph, with his mother out there in the kitchen, then what was the use of trying to do anything with Chris, with his father here in the front bedroom? Sick will, tainted blood, ruined body--to what were we all saving Chris? Maybe to misery and final defeat and some awful going out. "'I don't know,' she says, restless. 'Maybe Alex is right....' "She looked out towards the lilac bushes again, and I knew how all of a sudden they probably dissolved away to be the fine green in the conservatory at Proudfit House, and how she was seeing herself back in the bright room, with its summer of leaves, and before the tea wagon, making tea for Alex lounging in his low chair, begging her not, in heaven's name, to try to teach the wise old world....