But as he put it to himself, he knew all the roads and by-paths and cross-country leaps that would take him to the gutter, and to the gutter he would go.
Chapter VII
And all this while Letty was in the dining-room, learning certain lessons from her new-found friend.
For some little time she had been alone. Steptoe finished his conversation with Miss Walbrook on the telephone, but did not come back. She sat at the table feeding Beppo with bread and milk, but wondering if, after all, she hadn’t better make a bolt for it. She had had her breakfast, which was an asset to the good, and nothing worse could happen to her out in the open world than she feared in this great dim, gloomy house. She had once crept in to look at the cathedral and, overwhelmed by its height, immensity, and mystery, had crept out again. Its emotional suggestions had been more than she could bear. She felt now as if her bed had been made and her food laid out in that cathedral—as if, as long as she remained, she must eat and sleep in this vast, pillared solemnity.
And that was only one thing. There were small practical considerations even more terrible to confront. If Nettie were to appear again ...
But it was as to this that Steptoe was making his appeal. “I sye, girls, don’t you go to mykin’ a fuss and spoilin’ your lives, when you’ve got a chanst as’ll never come again.”
Mrs. Courage answered for them all. To sacrifice 76 decency to self-interest wasn’t in them, nor never would be. Some there might be, like ’Enery Steptoe, who would sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, but Mary Ann Courage was not of that company, nor any other woman upon whom she could use her influence. If a hussy had been put to reign over them, reigned over by a hussy none of them would be. All they asked was to see her once, to deliver the ultimatum of giving notice.
“It’s a strynge thing to me,” Steptoe reasoned, “that when one poor person gets a lift, every other poor person comes down on ’em.”