He dived in a pouch and brought one out, flushing again, but looking at her cocky: There you are, mistress. Enjoy your money while you have it. There’s a time coming when your class won’t have it long.

Chris’s temper quite went with her a minute, silly fool, the heat she supposed, she didn’t care:

My class? It was digging its living in sweat while yours lay down with a whine in the dirt. Good-bye.

Εwan was tired enough of the going next week, lying in bed, reading in books, feeling the throb under the bandages go. If only they’d leave him alone with the books…. And he thought Most people—how they hate you to read!

They were at him all hours: Chris in the morning, decent sort Chris, though you’d never got very close to each other since that winter in Segget, further off now since you’d made it plain her notions on begettings weren’t necessarily yours. But once or twice when she put her arm under your head and unwound the bandage in the early morning, stuck on the lint, hands and arms so alive you felt queer—as though you were falling in love! You’d gathered the reactions were something like that, and possible enough for all that you knew, those psychoanalyst Jewboy chaps had had cases enough, record on record, Œdipus the first of the Unhanged Unhygienics—Rot! Let’s dig in the phosphor bronze!

She’d hardly have gone than a thunderous chapp, and in would come waddling Mrs Cleghorn, very fat, very oozing, you rather liked her. Supposed it was her jollity, easily come by, it didn’t mean much and couldn’t mean much, but a bearable ingredient—so damn scarce. She’d plump on the bed and ask how you were, not stop for an answer, instead start in to tell of the time when her husband, Jim, was ill—with mumps, so he’d said, and looking like a tattie scone. And he’d been fair ashamed to have mumps at his age, the daft old tyke, Ma had wondered a bit, funny-like mumps for a body to have. So she’d hauled in the doctor, will he nill he, and then could you guess what his illness was? You couldn’t, you were over innocent and young, but the cause turned out to be one of those trollops down in Fish Market, Jim had chased her and gotten her and got tally-ho. And he’d got more than that when the doctor left.

Ewan had said Oh? not caring a rap, and Ma had nodded, Mind out for the women. You’re over bonny a lad to be taken that way. Ewan’d said, grave, he’d be sure to mind, and Ma had said Fine, and gone, thank God. Back to that chapter on phosphor-bronze smelting, house cleared with the others all off to their work. All?—No luck, a knock on the door.

Miss Murgatroyd this time, thin and peeking, tittering and shy like a wren gone erotic, Eh me, in a Gentleman’s Room, such a scandal! I thought you’d maybe like an orange or so, she’d brought two of the things, great bulging brutes. You said you were sorry you never ate them, and she shrivelled in a way and you really felt sorry—why couldn’t old people leave one alone?—always in need of pity, compassion, soft words to fend off the edge of things, cuddling in words, oh, damn them all!