She could remember years ago, sitting in this room with John, or sitting above in his own room, talking to him for hours, deriding his father to him, and repeating tales about the shopkeepers she had to deal with and about the neighbors. Night after night she had followed him upstairs when he went to do his homework. She was constantly being insulted by shopkeepers and hawkers at the door and by people she came up against in the street, or in the park when she went for a walk. She couldn’t measure up to them, she often said, but she wouldn’t let them have the satisfaction of getting away with it. Hubert had grown weary of listening and said she would do better to forget these things. Hubert said there was no sense dredging things up, and that if a person as much as looked crooked at her, she felt she had been dealt a mortal injury. He said she was only punishing herself, and that if she wanted to, all right, but she could leave him out of it.

But John was a very sympathetic little boy, always. From his earliest years there had been an understanding between him and her. They used to go together to the park, and they would sit on a bench and stare the people down. If a woman they didn’t like looked at them, he would pipe up and ask the woman what she thought she was staring at. That was when he was a child. Later, when he got to be twelve or so, he became very conscious of his dignity, and he used to like to go off and spend long hours in the library. On the day he left to study for the priesthood, she went to the parish church and posted a slip of paper in the petition box, and on the paper she had scribbled with her indelible grocery-list pencil, I want my own back, I want my own back.

The seasons of the year made little difference to the poor men and women. They came winter and summer, but in the cold weather they looked worse off. A young woman came knocking at the door, a day that was very cold. She had a child with her, a little girl. The woman was bedraggled, servile, and not far from witless. The little girl was eight, very small for her age, with a sly, worn face that had great spirit in it. She wore heavy boy’s boots on her little feet, and no stockings. When the door was opened she smiled ingratiatingly, chin out like a monkey. She jumped up and down and rubbed her knees together for warmth. She examined Mrs. Derdon’s dress with bright envious eyes and tried to see past her into the hall.