It was an incandescent burner, hanging from the centre of the ceiling, and the girls' living room was revealed.
It was a very simple, comely, makeshift little home.
On one side of the fireplace—now filled with a brown and gasping harts-tongue fern in an earthen pot—was Ethel's bookshelf.
Up-to-date she had a hundred and thirty-two books, of the "Everyman" and "World's Classics" series. She generally managed a book and a half each fortnight, and her horizon was bounded by the two-hundredth volume. Dickens she had very much neglected of late, the new Ruskin had kept the set at "David Copperfield" for weeks, but she was getting on steadily with her Thackeries.
Rita had no books. She was free of that Kingdom at the Podley Institute, but the little black piano was hers. The great luxury of the Chesterfield was a joint extravagance. Both ends would let down to make a couch when necessary, and though it had cost the girls three pounds ten, it "made all the difference to the room."
All the photographs upon the mantel-shelf were Ethel's. There was her father in his cassock—staring straight out of the frame like a good and patient mule. . . . Her sisters and brothers also, of all ages and sizes, and all clothed with an odd suggestion of masquerading, of attempting the right thing. Not but what they were all perfect to poor Ethel, whose life was far too busy and limited to understand the tragedy of clothes.
Rita's photographs were on the piano.
There were several of her school-friends—lucky Rita had been to a smart school!—and the enigmatic face of Muriel Amberley with its youthful Mona Lisa smile looked out from an oval frame of red leather stamped with an occasional fleur-de-lys in gold.
There was a portrait of Mr. Podley, cut from the Graphic and framed cheaply, and there were two new photographs.
One of them was that of a curly-headed, good-looking young man with rather thick lips and a painful consciousness that he was being photographed investing the whole picture with suspense.