Then, more through instinct than of her will, her finger pressed the call-button beneath the Thursby letter box.
The latch clicked. She pushed the door open, moved reluctantly into the shadows and addressed herself wearily to the stairs, inhaling with a keen physical disgust the heavy and malodorous atmosphere in which her youth had been shaped toward womanhood.
As the dining-room door admitted her, she checked again, almost tempted to question the soundness of those faculties which insisted that more than a year had passed, rather than an hour or two, since she had left that mean and sordid place.
Above the dining-table blazed and wheezed a single gas-jet, whose ragged bluish flame was yet sufficiently strong to turn to the colour of night the dull dawnlight outside the air-shaft windows. It revealed to her not a single article of furniture other than as memory placed it, and showed her, seated on the far side of the table, her father lifting a heavy and sullen face from the note-book between his soiled fat fingers, that inevitable sheaf of dope lying at his elbow.
There was no sort of greeting, in proper sense, between these two. For a little neither spoke. Joan hesitated, with shoulders against the panels of the door, in an attitude instinctively defiant and defensive. Thursby looked her up and down, a louring sneer marking his recognition of his daughter's finery.
Suddenly, explosively, she found her tongue: "How's ma?"
Thursby jerked a thumb in the direction of the bedrooms.
"She died an hour ago," he said slowly, "just after Ed went to find you. Edna's in there."
Joan made a gesture of horror.
"My God!" she said throatily, and turned away.