When she saw the waifs trooping after him down the stairs, Mrs. Maturin
called him the Pied Piper of Hampton.

As time went on, Janet sometimes wondered over the quiet manner in which
these two people, Insall and Mrs. Maturin, took her visits as though they
were matters of course, and gave her their friendship. There was, really,
no obvious excuse for her coming, not even that of the waifs for
food--and yet she came to be fed. The sustenance they gave her would have
been hard to define; it flowed not so much from what they said, as from
what they were; it was in the atmosphere surrounding them. Sometimes she
looked at Mrs. Maturin to ask herself what this lady would say if she
knew her history, her relationship with Ditmar--which had been her real
reason for entering the ranks of the strikers. And was it fair for her,
Janet, to permit Mrs. Maturin to bestow her friendship without revealing
this? She could not make up her mind as to what this lady would say.
Janet had had no difficulty in placing Ditmar; not much trouble, after
her first surprise was over, in classifying Rolfe and the itinerant band
of syndicalists who had descended upon her restricted world. But Insall
and Mrs. Maturin were not to be ticketed. What chiefly surprised her, in
addition to their kindliness, to their taking her on faith without the
formality of any recommendation or introduction, was their lack of
intellectual narrowness. She did not, of course, so express it. But she
sensed, in their presence, from references casually let fall in their
conversation, a wider culture of which they were in possession, a culture
at once puzzling and exciting, one that she despaired of acquiring for
herself. Though it came from reading, it did not seem "literary,"
according to the notion she had conceived of the term. Her speculations
concerning it must be focussed and interpreted. It was a culture, in the
first place, not harnessed to an obvious Cause: something like that