It's my
business to know. There's something about his playing. That _something
different_ they're all out for."
It took a long time to get back to Canning Town. Even Jenny had lost
her certainty: her grasp of the ways of 'buses and such things. She
felt oddly clear and empty: like a room swept and garnished, with the
sense of a ghost in some dim corner of it; physically sapped out.
Ben clung to her. He said very little, but he clung to her, with an
odd, lost air: the look of a child who has been slapped in the face,
and cannot understand why.
She was so much smaller than he, like a diminutive, sturdy steam-tug;
and yet if she could have carried him, she would have done so.
As it was, she threw her whole heart and soul into guiding, comforting;
thinking of a hundred things at once, her soft mouth folded tight with
anxiety.--How to prevent him from feeling shamed before his mother: how
to keep the trouble away from her: though at the back of her own mind
was a feeling--and she had an idea that it would be at the back of old
Mrs. Cohen's also--of immense relief, of some load gone: almost as
though her child had been through a bad attack of scarlet-fever, or
something which one does not take twice.
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