"The side my pocket is."

"And if you had no pocket?"

"The side my bad foot is."

"I meant you to say, 'the side my heart is,' " said Mrs. Elliot,
holding up the duster between them. "Most of us--I mean all of
us--can feel on one side a little watch, that never stops
ticking. So even if you had no bad foot you would still know
which is the left. No. 50 white, please. No; I'll get it myself."
For she had remembered that the dark passage frightened him.

These were the outlines. Rickie filled them in with the slowness
and the accuracy of a child. He was never told anything, but he
discovered for himself that his father and mother did not love
each other, and that his mother was lovable. He discovered that
Mr. Elliot had dubbed him Rickie because he was rickety, that he
took pleasure in alluding to his son's deformity, and was sorry
that it was not more serious than his own. Mr. Elliot had not one
scrap of genius. He gathered the pictures and the books and the
flower-supports mechanically, not in any impulse of love. He
passed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he
passed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite
like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one
single thing that had the slightest beauty or value. And in time
Rickie discovered this as well.

The boy grew up in great loneliness. He worshipped his mother,
and she was fond of him. But she was dignified and reticent, and