She was an unwieldy woman with a tart tongue and tight varnished hair. Every afternoon she would put on a battered bonnet and go forth for what she called “a breff of fresh air.” She would return about five, smelling of gin and very affable. He preferred her cuffs to her kisses.
Uncle would come home at a quarter past six. He was a French-cleaner, a monosyllabic man who loved his pipe. One evening he broke his stoic silence.
“Missis, it’s time that boy ’ad some schoolin’.”
“Schoolin’! the ideer! And tell me ’oo’s goin’ to do the work of this ’ouse while he’s wastin’ ’is time over a lot o’ useless ’istry an’ jography?”
“I tell you, missis, he’s got to have some eddication. He’s goin’ on for nine now and knows next to nothin’.”
“Well, you know wot it means. It means payin’ some lazy slut of a ’ouse-maid sixteen bob a month.”
“Well, and why can’t you pay it out of that five ’undred pounds ’is mother gave you to look after ’im?”
“’Eaven ’ear the man! And ’aven’t I looked after ’im? ’Aven’t I earned all she gave me? ’Aven’t I bin a second muvver to ’im? Didn’t I nurse ’er like a sister, and ’er dyin’ of consumption? There ain’t many ’as would ’ave done wot I did.”
The difficulty of his education, however, was solved by the second-floor back, Miss Pingley, who undertook to give him lessons for two hours every day. She was the cousin of a clergyman and excessively genteel, so that his manners improved under her care.
Once he began to read his imagination was awakened. More than ever he hated the sordid life around him. He began to think seriously of running away, and would no doubt have done so, had not Uncle again intervened. One evening the silent man laid down his pipe.