“You’ll excuse the place being a bit untidy,” she said. “My man has just got fresh work, and he has but now told me we shall have to be flitting in a week’s time. We are going to Compton Buildings in the Goswell Road.”
After Rowan Tree House, the rooms, of course, felt tiny, and they were a good deal blocked up with furniture, to say nothing of five small children who played about in the kitchen. But the place was capitally planned, every inch was turned to account, and Sigrid thought they might live there very comfortably. She talked over sundry details with the present owner.
“There’s but one thing, miss, I complain of, and that is that they don’t put in another cupboard or two,” said the good woman. “Give me another cupboard and I should be quite content. But you see, miss, there’s always a something that you’d like to alter, go where you will.”
“I wonder,” said Sigrid, “if we took them, whether I could pay one of the neighbors to do my share of sweeping and scrubbing the stairs, and whether I could get them to scrub out these rooms once a week. You see, I don’t think I could manage the scrubbing very well.”
“Oh, miss, there would be no difficulty in that,” said the woman. “There’s many that would be thankful to earn a little that way, and the same with laundry work. You wont find no difficulty in getting that done. There’s Mrs. Hallifield in the next set; she would be glad enough to do it, I know, and you couldn’t have a pleasanter neighbor; she’s a bit lonesome, poor thing, with her husband being so much away. He’s a tram-car man, he is, and gets terrible long hours week-day and Sunday alike.”
Owing to the good woman’s north-country accent Sigrid had not been able quite to follow this last speech, but she understood enough to awaken in her a keen curiosity, and to show her that their new life might have plenty of human interest in it. She looked out of one of the windows at the big square of houses and tried to picture the hundreds of lives which were being lived in them.
“Do you know, I begin to like this great court-yard,” she said to Cecil. “At first it looked to me dreary, but now it looks to me like a great, orderly human hive; there is something about it that makes one feel industrious.”
“We will settle down here, then,” said Frithiof, smiling; “and you shall be queen bee.”
“You think it would not hurt Swanhild?” asked Sigrid, turning to Mrs. Boniface. “The place seems to me beautifully airy.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Boniface, “I think in many ways the place is most comfortable, and certainly you could not do better, unless you give a very much higher rent.”