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he went about pretending that he was collecting debts that nobody owed, it would be no time before he found himself inside again.’
    ‘Inside what?’ repeated Mamma.
    ‘In prison,’ explained Kate.
    ‘Has the poor man been in prison?’ asked Mamma.
    ‘Six months in Wandsworth,’ said Kate, ‘and not a day too short.’
    ‘But he must have been terribly hurt when you said that!’ protested Mamma.
    ‘No, he would not be hurt so long as I called it inside,’ said Kate, impatiently, as if Mamma might not understand quite a lot of things, but she should have understood that.
    ‘Why was he sent to prison?’ asked Cordelia, shivering with distaste.
    ‘He got into trouble because he cannot leave well alone,’ said Kate. ‘He has this good job as a debt-collector, but the thought of a roof on an empty house is too much for him.’
    ‘But what can he do with the roof of an empty house?’ marvelled Mamma.
    ‘He gets together with some like himself, who you would probably like to help as well,’ Kate told her, just not altering her deferential tone, ‘and they break into the house and climb on the roof and strip off the lead and take it away and sell it to dealers, who give them next to nothing for it because they know where it comes from, and that is what annoys the laundry-man most, his name dragged in the mud and all for a few shillings. And it is a cruel thing to do, too. When the lead is gone off a roof, the rain comes in, and think of the poor people who are the next to move in and find themselves soaked in their beds, and the poor landlord who has to replace the lead! And it is not like giving way to a strong temptation, like a poor man passing a shop and seeing something only the rich can enjoy and making away with it. To break in to a house and take the lead off the roof a man must carry tools and have his mind made up. And it was a mean thing to do, to come to you and blacken the poor master’s name with a debt more than he owed, when there is no grown man in the house to give scoundrels what they deserve. I did not think the old wretch was as bad as that.’
    ‘But he cannot help being what he is,’ said Mamma.
    ‘And if you had sent for the police you could not have helped that either,’ said Kate.
    ‘That is what I am saying,’ said Mamma. ‘We all act as we are made.’
    ‘If we are all as we are made, why have you tried, year after year, sun and shine, to make the young ladies less wild and hasty and to get Master Richard Quin to work at his books?’ asked Richard Quin.
    ‘Oh, training is another thing,’ said Mamma. ‘But I do not suppose that old Tom Partridge had much training.’
    ‘He had as much training as the laundry-man and his wife,’ said Kate, ‘and they are sick of his thieving, sneaking ways.’
    ‘It is not only the question of whether people can help doing what they do,’ said Mamma. ‘One must be kind to them whatever they do, when things have gone wrong that is the only way of getting them right.’
    ‘But it would be far better if you were kind to the laundry-man and his wife,’ said Kate.
    ‘I will be kind to them if they need it and if I can give them what they need,’ said Mamma. ‘But they probably do not require my help. It is the terrible thing about the other people, the ones like Tom Partridge who are gripped by this desire to do fatal things, that they get themselves into positions where they are lost if they are not helped.’
    ‘But such people could stop doing all these foolish things the minute they wanted to,’ said Kate. ‘Old Tom Partridge chooses to steal lead off roofs, the laundry-man and his wife choose to be honest and decent, and that is what makes the difference between them, and nothing else.’
    ‘Oh, Kate, do not believe it is as simple as that,’ my mother begged.
    ‘What is this argument about?’ enquired Mr Morpurgo. He had been knocking at the front door for some time, but we had been too deeply interested in the