Florence made a grimace, and tossed her pigtail. "It's freckles," she said, hopelessly. "I've been scrubbing away for ten minutes." She looked at Humphrey appealingly, with a smile in her eyes—they all had that smile he knew so well.
"I think you're too hard on your sister, Miss Filmer," he said to Lilian, with mock gravity. (How odd the Miss Filmer sounded.) "She looks radiant. I noticed it was freckles at once." Florence went to Lilian and put her arm round her waist. They were evidently very sisterly. Edith was busy pouring out tea ("One lump or two, Mr Quain"); Mrs Filmer sat with her hands crossed in her lap looking out of the window into the garden beyond. Humphrey took a cup of tea across to her; she was too effusive in her thanks; begged him to sit down, and urged Florence to look after Mr Quain. Just then the front door clicked. "There's Harry," said Edith, putting down the teapot, and running to the door. A short, well-built young man appeared. His hair was the reddish colour of Florence's hair, and his face was frank and boyish. He was about nineteen years old, just the age of discrimination in ties and socks, and the flaunting of well-filled cigarette cases. He and Edith were apparently the greatest friends, doubtless because there was only two years' interval in their ages. Nevertheless, he pulled Florence's pigtail affectionately and gave her a brotherly kiss; pecked Lilian on the cheek ("What a horrid collar you're wearing, Harry," she said, "and you simply reek of tobacco"), and kissed his mother on her forehead. Then Lilian introduced him to Humphrey Quain, and they shook hands and regarded each other furtively, with a constrained silence.
Humphrey felt that the whole family must know of the relations between Lilian and himself, though not one of them spoke about it. But they all treated him with a certain deference, and gave him a status in the house, which invested him with a superiority that seemed to match Lilian's. For there was no doubt of her superiority in this household, now that they were all gathered together. She seemed so stalwart and broad beside them; a creature apart from them all. She did not appear to belong to them, and yet she was, indisputably, of them. They were so commonplace, and she was so rare—at least, that was what Humphrey thought. He watched her as she moved about the room bearing plates and cups, noiselessly, gracefully; she gave him a new impression of domesticity as she wandered about in her own home without the hat that he was accustomed to see her wearing. And she gave him, furthermore, an appearance of strength and character, as though she had acquired the right to rule in this household by the might of her own toil which chiefly supported it. While she was in the room, it lost some of its faded quality, and when she left it to take a cup of tea and a piece of cake to Mabel, the third sister, who was an invalid lying, he understood, on a couch upstairs, the room became desolate, and the most insistent person was the faded mother with her querulous voice.
They made him look at picture-postcard albums and photographs, and some of Florence's drawings, while Lilian was absent. Florence wanted to be a fashion artist, and though her drawings were incredibly bad and scratchy, he felt it was necessary for him to say that they showed promise.... How had Lilian grown to be Lilian in these surroundings, he wondered—surroundings of such frank ugliness and shabby gentility?
He glanced out of the window which gave a view of a narrow oblong garden at the back, where a few stunted wallflowers struggled to live. A patch of unkempt grass ran between the high walls, and there a broken wicker-work chair faced the windows. As he looked out he saw a man stumbling over the grass towards the side door: he caught a glimpse of the soiled and frayed clothes, and feet clothed in down-at-the-heel slippers, of a grey face with shrunken cheeks, and pale blue eyes that peered weakly from beneath grey wiry eyebrows. The man came across his vision like a spectre, trailing his slippered feet one after another, and swaying a little as he walked. He was fascinated by the sight, and suddenly his attention was distracted by Lilian. She had come back to the room, and was standing at his side. Her eyes had followed his, and she knew what he had seen. "Will you have some more tea?" she said, abruptly, touching him on the shoulder. He turned away hastily: his eyes met hers; they held a challenge in them, as though she were daring him to speak of the man in the garden. It was as if he had probed into a carefully hidden secret.
He knew, without being told, that this aimless, shambling man with the slippered feet was the father. He was given in a moment the explanation of this room; the mother; the invalid child; and the air of subdued failure that brooded over the house. He saw Lilian as a regenerating, purifying influence, trying to lift them out of the slough. Their eyes met, and though no word was passed between them, he understood everything.
He wished that he had not come to this house. This family depressed him, and made him feel afraid of Life. It was an odd thought that haunted him: they would be his relations when he married Lilian.
But when, after the leave-takings, she came to the door to help him on with his coat and let him out, he realized that she was unchanged, that she was still splendid for him, and as desirable as she had always been. He felt something of a hero, because he was going to rescue her from this dreadful home of hers....
The memory of the father dogged his thoughts as he came away. He wished he had not gone to the house.