In the confidence born of the perfect happening at the perfect moment in the perfect way, Mrs. Clapham wondered how it had been possible for anybody to be as much afraid as Poor Stephen. She was almost inclined to feel impatient with him, looking back, though she had been sorry enough, and even fiercely indignant, at the time. In common with others in the street, she had done her best to see that Stephen was fed, that his clothes were mended and brushed before he went off to school, that there was a fire for him to sit by in cold weather when he chose, and sometimes a penny slipped in his pocket for buying sweets. But Stephen had been hard to help, as are all early-abused, early-cowed young things, and it was not often that he could be decoyed into other people’s houses even for his good. It was almost as if the contrast between what he found there and what was waiting—or wasn’t waiting—for him at home, was more than his wounded spirit was able to bear. In any case, he had avoided their kindly designs whenever he could, choosing his moment to slip past when they weren’t looking, or creeping back again at night with ears deaf to their shrill calls. Often and often she had seen him stealing by in the winter dusk, resolutely turning his eyes from their open, fire-streaming doors. Even in the September sunshine Mrs. Clapham shivered at the thought of that going home, back to the dreary house in which he had been born afraid. It was many a year now since she had set foot in Emma’s house, but, gradually feeling back, she got its atmosphere again. She could remember little, indeed, of how it had looked; she could only remember how it had felt. Going into Emma’s was not so much going into a house as letting yourself into the four walls of Emma Catterall’s mind. Everything that was in it looked as it did because of Emma, so that the tables hardly seemed tables, or the chairs chairs, or the beds beds. Even Emma’s husband had somehow had that effect, had suffered a sea-change simply because he was Emma’s. Jemmy Catterall had been weak and foolish as a young man, but he had not been the inhuman monster he appeared later. Marriage with Emma had turned him shortly into a sullen brute, subject to fits of fury which stamped him wrong in the head. That undependableness of mood had been a sorry atmosphere for Stephen, combined with that terrible sensing of something that wasn’t sane.