"'But the dirt—' she says.
"'What do you expect?' I says. 'They're emergin' out of dirt. But they are emergin'.'
"'Don't it seem hopeless?' says she.
"'Oh, I donno,' I says; 'dirt gets to be apples—so be you plant 'em.'
"But the Cadoza kitchen was fearful. When we come through it, Mis' Cadoza was getting supper, and she'd woke up nameless smells of greasy things. There the bare table was piled with the inevitable mix-up of unwashed dishes that go along with the Mis' Cadozas of this world, so that you wonder how they ever got so much crockery together. There the floor wasn't swept, clothes was drying on a line over the stove, Spudge was eating his supper on the window-sill, and in his bed in the corner lay little Eph, so white and frail and queer-coloured that you felt you was looking on something bound not to last till much after you'd stopped looking. And there was Mis' Cadoza. When we had come through the kitchen, little Eph had said something glad at seeing Insley and hung hold of his hand and told him how he meant to model a clay Patsy, because it was Patsy, the dog, that had gone out in the dark and first brought Insley in to see him.
"'An' when I'm big,' the child says, 'I'm going to make a clay you, Mr. Insley.'
"Mis' Cadoza had turned round and bared up her crooked teeth.
"'Don't you be impident!' she had said, raspish, throwing her hand out angular.
"Mis' Cadoza was like somebody that hadn't got outside into the daylight of Yet. She was ignorant, blind to life, with some little bit of a corner of her brain working while the rest lay stock-still in her skull; unclean of person, the mother to no end of nameless horrors of habit—and her blood and the blood of some creature like her had been poured into that poor little boy, sickly, bloodless, not ready for the struggle.