“Well, if you wouldn’t mind.” Michael felt bound to apologize to her, whatever was suggested.
She sighed her way upstairs, and at last flung open a door for them to enter the vacant room.
The view from here was certainly more spacious, and a great deal of the permeating depression was lightened by looking out as it were over another city across the railway, a city with streamers of smoke, and even here and there a flag flying. At the same time the room itself was less potentially endurable than the ground-floor; there was no fireplace and the few scraps of furniture were more discouraging than the positive emptiness downstairs. Michael shuddered as he looked at the gimcrack washstand through whose scanty paint the original wood was visible in long fibrous sores. He shuddered, too, at the bedstead with its pleated iron laths furred by dust and rust, and at the red mattress exuding flock like clustered maggots.
“This is furnished, of course,” said Mrs. Cleghorne, complacently sucking a tooth. “Well, which will you have?”
“I think perhaps I’ll take the ground-floor rooms. I’ll have them done up.”
“Oh, they’re quite clean. The last people was a bit dirty. So I gave them an extra-special clear-out.”
“But you wouldn’t object to my doing them up?” persisted Michael.
“Oh, no, I shouldn’t object,” said Mrs. Cleghorne, and in her accent was the suggestion that equally she would not be likely to derive very much pleasure from the fruition of Michael’s proposal.
They were going downstairs again now, and Mrs. Cleghorne was evidently beginning to acquire a conviction of her own importance, because somebody had contemplated with a certain amount of interest those two empty rooms on the ground floor; in the gratification of her pride she was endowing them with a value and a character they did not possess.
“I’ve always said that, properly cared for, those two rooms are worth any other two rooms in the house. And of course that’s the reason I’m really compelled to charge a bit more for them. I always say to everyone right out—if you want the two best rooms in the house, why, you must pay according. They’re only empty now because I’ve always been particular about letting them. I won’t have anybody, and that’s a fact. Mr. Barnes here knows I’m really fond of those rooms.”