But she had resolved to take no notice of anything not immediately directed to herself, and Grace left the room.
Relieved by not being asked for any explanation, Margaret threw herself now again into the matter. The bookshelves, standing almost empty, were soon comfortably filled, and then Mrs. Dorriman, who had a happy gift of arrangement, moved the tables and chairs about, made a comfortable corner for her brother, and gave a look of home to the room which it had sorely needed, by which time the morning had passed away.
In the afternoon Mrs. Dorriman wished to go and see how Jean fared; but she did not want to be out of the way if the girls wanted to go out with her.
Before she rose to find them, however, she heard the hall-door shut, and she saw them walking down the avenue.
"They might have said something to me," she thought, but she understood immediately that this was another protest made by Grace against any "interference."
She went off herself, not sorry to be alone, feeling the squalor of the narrow streets through which she passed—like all people who are easily impressed by the absence of any beauty in life. She felt for the poor human beings who toiled so hard for such a bare and unlovely existence. The grey houses with their dirty, ill-kept doors, and the "common stairs," upon which went so many weary feet. In front, a bit of trodden-down mud and a black stream, in which dirty ducks and dirtier children paddled. Her spirits sank lower and lower. At length she arrived at the address she had got from Jean, and was asked to "walk up the stair" by a shock-headed girl, without any attempt at tidiness, "busy," and evidently imagining that in that fact lay excuse enough for all disregard of appearance.
Jean, clean, trim, but with eyes that told their own tale of weeping, was scrubbing a floor; unaccustomed to such treatment, the shutters and woodwork all glistened, and the floor was nearly finished. It was one of the rooms, part kitchen, part bedroom, which you obtain in towns where overcrowding is the rule. The window was small and high up—worse than this, it could not open.
"And is this your situation? This the place you were coming to, my poor dear Jean?" asked Mrs. Dorriman, in faltering tones.
"'Deed, my dear, I may just say, without vanity, I could get mony a situation; but I am here working housekeeper to two lads—kin to myself, my dear. No one to hurry me or hinder me, and little to do. So little, I'll be often down bothering you."
She spoke lightly, afraid of giving way. The sight of Mrs. Dorriman brought back all her own misgivings of the day before; when she had found herself in an airless room, with nothing but filth and dirt around her, and not a "kent face" near her.