acquired a knowledge of certain individual propensities and
idiosyncrasies that delighted their companions.

"What's the trouble, Stepan--swallowed your spoon?" Stepan was known to
be greedy. Or he would suddenly seize an unusually solemn boy from behind
and tickle him until the child screamed with laughter. It was, indeed,
something of an achievement to get on terms of confidence with these
alien children of the tenements and the streets who from their earliest
years had been forced to shift for themselves, and many of whom had
acquired a precocious suspicion of Greeks bearing gifts. Insall himself
had used the phrase, and explained it to Janet. That sense of caveat
donor was perhaps their most pathetic characteristic. But he broke it
down; broke down, too, the shyness accompanying it, the shyness and
solemnity emphasized in them by contact with hardship and poverty, with
the stark side of life they faced at home. He had made them--Mrs. Maturin
once illuminatingly remarked--more like children. Sometimes he went to
see their parents,--as in the case of Marcus--to suggest certain hygienic
precautions in his humorous way; and his accounts of these visits, too,
were always humorous. Yet through that humour ran a strain of pathos that
clutched--despite her smile--at Janet's heartstrings. This gift of
emphasizing and heightening tragedy while apparently dealing in comedy
she never ceased to wonder at. She, too, knew that tragedy of the
tenements, of the poor, its sordidness and cruelty. All her days she had
lived precariously near it, and lately she had visited these people, had
been torn by the sight of what they endured. But Insall's jokes, while
they stripped it of sentimentality of which she had an instinctive
dislike--made it for her even more poignant. One would have thought, to
have such an insight into it, that he too must have lived it, must have
been brought up in some dirty alley of a street. That gift, of course,
must be a writer's gift.