By Jove, yes. One of the reasons why household people like the odd, homeless sort is that they make them realise the snugness by revelling in it.
Miss Holland was audible upstairs rattling saucepan lids. They were to feed up there, kept warm by the ugly oil-cooker, and reserve the back room for elegant life and tea-parties.
Already Miss Holland had made breakfast on the cooker. By means of some mechanism in its interior. Interesting to explore. One day she would explore it. Find out its secret and then to be quite sure, ask Miss Holland. It stood out, as she thought of it, as the most fascinating thing upstairs, next to the way the light came through the long lattice; and the shadows upon the slopes of the roof.
“You shall teach me,” she heard her own sleepy voice over the welcome tray; “how to kick——”
“How to kick a cooper!” Miss Holland had trilled without a moment’s hesitation, and, after they had laughed: “Kippers require very little in the way of cooking.” A memory of Eleanor: “’Addocks don’t ’ardly need any cooking de-er.”
She tipped herself off the little bed that made such an excellent sofa, and strolled into the back room.
It was darker than ever. Round and round she looked, taking in the things. Looking for more, and different, things. Absurdly half believing that the things she saw would change, would somehow become different under her eyes.
Green serge curtains, patched and faded, hung dismally on either side of the window. Two easy-chairs covered with faded threadbare cretonne filled, with their huge ugliness, the main part of the floor-space. Between them stood a stained and battered bamboo table and an ancient footstool, worn colourless. Pushed into a corner was a treadle sewing-machine, and at its side a small round table bearing a tarnished lamp. That was all. That was all there would be in their sitting-room.
The worst was that nothing shone. Nothing reflected light. It suddenly struck her as an odd truth that nothing of Miss Holland’s reflected light. Even the domed wooden cover of the sewing-machine, which was polished and should have shone, was filmed and dull.
The only suggestion of life in the room would be the backs of the books stacked in piles on the mantelshelf. She found relief for her oppression in the minute gilded titles of some of the books. They gleamed faintly in the gloom, minute threads of gold.