“You don’t understand politics, Jinny.”
“I understand poverty. The Pennymoles are better off, now they’ve got two boys grown up and earning sixpence a day. But I’ve seen Mrs. Pennymole making tea with charred bread, and her husband compelled to steal the cabbages left for the cows. . . . Oh, I oughtn’t to have said that,” she added in alarm.
“You certainly oughtn’t! Compelled to break the Eighth Commandment—a pretty doctrine! And such liars, too. I saw quite a little girl munching a turnip she’d just filched from my field, and when I complained to her mother, the woman unblushingly said, ‘’Tis me fats her up with swedes and turnips.’ ”
“They can’t see their children hunger.”
“They can put some of them in the poorhouse.”
“Look at the mites there, white and half-starved. Sometimes I’ve got to deliver a parcel to Mr. Jims, the porter, and I hear the Master thrashing ’em with a stick.”
“And it’s what boys need—even my brat. Carrying parcels, indeed!” He stopped abruptly.
“Well, but they make the old folks of eighty and ninety scour the stone steps and do the washing!”
“They needn’t go in—they can get relief from the parish.”
“The parish! Eighteenpence a week for the family when the father’s bedridden.”