"She never will have a light here, unless she's doing the grand for someone. Are you going to wash ye?"
"No. I cleaned up at the works." A presentiment of the damp chilliness of the Hamps bedroom had suggested this precaution.
Maggie preceded him into the sitting-room, where a hexagonal occasional-table was laid for tea.
"Hello! Do you eat here? What's the matter with the dining-room?"
"The chimney always smokes when the wind's in the south-west."
"Well, why doesn't she have a cowl put on it?"
"You'd better ask her.... Also she likes to save a fire. She can't bear to have two fires going as well as the kitchen-range. I'll bring tea in. It's all ready."
Maggie went away.
Edwin looked round the shabby Victorian room. A length of featureless linoleum led from the door to the table. This carpet-protecting linoleum exasperated him. It expressed the very spirit of his aunt's house. He glanced at the pictures, the texts, the beady and the woolly embroideries, the harsh chairs, and the magnificent morocco exteriors of the photograph-albums in which Auntie Hamps kept the shiny portraits of all her relatives, from grand-nieces back to the third and fourth generation of ancestors. And a feeling of desolation came over him. He thought: "How many days shall I have to spend in this deadly hole?" It was extremely seldom that he visited King Street, and when he did come the house was brightened to receive him. He had almost forgotten what the house really was. And, suddenly thrown back into it at its most lugubrious and ignoble, after years of the amenities of Trafalgar Road, he was somehow surprised that that sort of thing had continued to exist, and he resented that it should have dared to continue to exist. He had a notion that, since he had left it behind, it ought to have perished.
He cautiously lifted the table and carried it to the hearthrug. Then he sat down in the easy-chair, whose special property, as he remembered, was slowly and inevitably to slide the sitter forward to the hard edge of the seat; and he put his feet inside the fender. In the grate a small fire burned between two fire-bricks. He sneezed. Maggie came in with a tray.