It was Mrs. Bailey coming up the top flight clearing her throat. Tapping at the door.
“Ah. I thought the young lady was in. I thought so.” Mrs. Bailey stood approving inside the door. The sunlight streamed on to her shabby skirt. The large dusty house, the many downstair rooms, the mysterious dark-roomed vault of the basement, all upright in her upright form; hurried smeary cleansings, swift straightening of grey-sheeted beds, the strange unfailing water-system, gurgling cisterns, gushing taps and lavatory flushes, the wonder of gaslight and bedroom candles, the daily meals magically appearing and disappearing; her knowledge of the various mysteriously arriving and vanishing people, all beginning and ending in her triumphant, reassuring smile that went forward outside beyond these things, with everybody.
Now that she was there, bearing and banishing all these heavy things, the squat green teapot on the table in the blaze of window-light, the Chinese lantern hanging from the hook in the ceiling, the little Madras muslin curtains at either end of the endmost lattices made a picture and set the room free from the challenge of the house accumulating as Miriam had come up through it and preventing the effect she had sought when she put out the green teapot on the sunlit table. She was receiving Mrs. Bailey as a guest, backed up by the summery little window-room. She stood back in the gloom, dropping back into the green lamplit stillness of the farmhouse garden. The Song of Hiawatha sounded on and on amongst the trees, the trunk of the huge sheltering oak lit brightly by the shaded lamp on the little garden table, the forms in the long chairs scarcely visible. She offered Mrs. Bailey the joy of her journey down, her bicycle in the van, Miss Szigmondy’s London guests, the sixteenth-century