It was, as a matter of fact, affecting her nerves.
Recumbent and motionless, she said placidly: "You'll catch cold walking about in your socks like this." This speech, becoming the solicitude of the wife and the prudence of the woman, took Mr Verloc unawares.

He had left his boots downstairs, but he had forgotten to put on his slippers, and he had been turning about the bedroom on noiseless pads like a bear in a cage.

At the sound of his wife's voice he stopped and stared at her with a somnambulistic, expressionless gaze so long that Mrs Verloc moved her limbs slightly under the bed-clothes.

But she did not move her black head sunk in the white pillow one hand under her cheek and the big, dark, unwinking eyes.
Under her husband's expressionless stare, and remembering her mother's empty room across the landing, she felt an acute pang of loneliness.

She had never been parted from her mother before.