white-hot iron drawn across her eyes; at the same
time her heart, hardened and chilled into a lump of ice, kept her body in an
inward shudder, set her features into a frozen, contemplative immobility
addressed to a whitewashed wall with no writing on it. The exigencies of Mrs.
Verloc's temperament, which, when stripped of its philosophical reserve, was
maternal and violent, forced her to roll a series of thoughts in her motionless
head. These thoughts were rather imagined than expressed. Mrs. Verloc was a
woman of singularly few words, either for public or private use. With the rage
and dismay of a betrayed woman, she reviewed the tenor of her life in visions
concerned mostly with Stevie's difficult existence from its earliest days. It
was a life of 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