"Yes. I am afraid our room was always in more or less of a muddle. Sometimes Ruth used to have what I called 'a tidy fit,' but it never lasted very long; for I was always forgetting, and she would be disheartened."
"Poor Ruth!" said Mrs. Reed, sympathetically.
"I am afraid it was hard lines on her," Violet admitted. "I expect if you saw what our home at Streatham is like you would be quite shocked," she continued, shaking her head and sighing, "but you don't know how difficult it is to be orderly in a little house with a lot of people in it."
"Oh, yes, indeed I do," Mrs. Reed answered, smiling; "I was brought up in a little house myself, and there were so many of us young folks that my father used to say we reminded him of birds packed in a nest. Tidiness is a mere matter of habit, my dear; the home where it is practised is generally a comfortable one, be it a palace or a cottage. Here's Ann coming to hear what I am lecturing you about. Come down to tea now, both of you."
So saying Mrs. Reed left the room, whilst Ann stood on the threshold regarding Violet inquiringly.
"Oh, Ann, I am ashamed of myself!" cried Violet, and her face showed that she spoke the truth. "I left my room in such a muddle," she went on to explain, "and your mother has been speaking to me about it—very kindly, but I know she is vexed with me, and no wonder. I ought not to be disorderly, for, as Mrs. Reed says, there's a place for everything; it's not as it was at home where Ruth and I had no wardrobe, only pegs behind the door to hang our things on."
"You'll be more careful another time," Ann said, consolingly; "mother wasn't angry, you know, Violet," she added, as she saw her companion's brown eyes were a trifle misty.
"Oh, I know she was not! Well, I must try not to give her cause to complain of me in that way again."
Violet did try, but often she relapsed into her disorderly habits, thereby bringing rebuke upon herself. She was always so genuinely sorry and repentant afterwards that Mrs. Reed refrained from speaking to her as sharply as she would otherwise have done, remembering, too, the manner in which the girl had been brought up in her own home.
Truth to tell Violet's new home was very unlike what she had expected. She had anticipated the house of a successful man, as she knew Dr. Reed to be, would be far different from what it actually was. She had imagined it managed regardless of expense, and she soon found, to her secret astonishment, that it was not, and that the strictest economy was practised by its mistress. There was enough of everything, but there was nothing superfluous. Mrs. Reed was one of the most careful of housewives, and, unlike poor Mrs. Wyndham, she knew to a farthing the amount of her expenditure.