“It seems to me that you missed a great many vocations,” she replied.  Commonplaces alone seemed possible, adequate.  “I suppose you made all those drawers yourself.”

He bowed in acknowledgment of her implied tribute.  With his fine nose and keen eyes—­set at a slightly downward angle, creased at the corners —­with his thick, greying hair, despite his comparative youth he had the look one associates with portraits of earlier, patriarchal Americans....  These calls of Janet’s were never of long duration.  She had fallen into the habit of taking her lunch between one and two, and usually arrived when the last installment of youngsters were finishing their meal; sometimes they were filing out, stopping to form a group around Insall, who always managed to say something amusing—­something pertinent and good-naturedly personal.  For he knew most of them by name, and had 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.

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