“Oh, he's to our house considerable,” replied Mamie, still with that evil light, which grew almost confidential, upon her face.
The boy chuckled a little and dug his toes into the frozen earth, then he whistled.
The Ramsey house was the original old homestead of the family. It was unspeakably decrepit and fallen from a former high estate. The old house presented to Maria's fancy something in itself degraded and loathsome. It seemed to partake actually of the character of its inmates—to be stained and swollen and out of plumb with unmentionable sins of degeneration. It was a very poisonous fungus of a house, with blotches of paint here and there, with its front portico supported drunkenly on swaying pillars, with its roof hollowed about the chimney, with great stains here and there upon the walls, which seemed like stains of sin rather than of old rains. Maria marched straight to the house, leading Jessy, with Mamie and Franky at her heels. She knocked on the door; there was no bell, of course. But Franky pushed past her and opened the door, and sang out, in his raucous voice:
“Hullo, mummer! Mummer!”
Mamie echoed him in her equally raucous voice, full of dissonances. “Mummer! Mummer!”
A woman, large and dirty, but rather showily clad, with a brave display of cheap jewelry, appeared in the doorway of a room on the right, from which also issued a warm, spirituous odor, mingled with onions and boiling meat. The woman, who had at one time been weakly pretty, and even now was not bad-looking, stared with a sort of vacant defiance at Maria.
“It's teacher, mummer,” volunteered Mamie.
Franky chuckled again, and again whistled. Franky's chuckles and whistles were characteristic of him. He often disturbed the school in such fashion.
Maria had a vision of a man in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside a red-hot stove, on which boiled the meat and onions. She began at once upon her errand.
“How do you do, Mrs. Ramsey?” said she.