In her new room Audrey found a great interest. She did all she could to make it pretty--it was the only part of the house that she did try to make pretty. On her writing-table she had always a vase of fresh flowers, and another on her dressing-table, and a jar of tall ferns in the grate. All that was easy enough to manage, but she found it rather a trial to have to make her own bed every day, and keep her room swept and dusted. Living with her granny, where everything was done for her, and the housework went on with the regularity of machinery, and without any share in it, or interest in it, on Audrey's part, she had grown up with a knowledge only of how things should look when done, but without the faintest idea of how to do them, or of the trouble it cost to make things nice, and keep them so. It had never occurred to her that to keep furniture brightly polished, and brass and silver too, windows gleaming, and window curtains spotless, meant constant care on somebody's part, and hard work too. She was beginning, though, to learn the value now of many things that she had taken for granted before. "If one did all that needs doing about a house," she said, excusingly to herself, "one would have no time for anything else, and I do want to write. If I could sell my stories I could help father tremendously, and that is far more important than dusting and cooking, and looking after the children. Faith can do that, she has no taste for writing. When lessons begin I shall have less time than ever for it, so I really must do all I can now." And fired with enthusiasm and importance, she shut herself up more and more in her attic, and Faith was left to look after her mother, and the children, and the house, pretty much as she was before; and if the muddle did not grow greater, it certainly did not grow less under Audrey's rule. "If you want to keep this house tidy you must always be tidying it," she grumbled, and to be always tidying it was certainly the last thing she wished or intended. So, as long as her own attic was neat and fragrant, she closed her eyes to the rest and was, apparently, content to let things go on as she found them. "Audrey, will you sit with mother this evening while I go to church?" Faith opened her sister's door nervously, and the face which appeared round it was decidedly apologetic. She was always afraid that she might be interrupting Audrey at a critical point in the story she was writing, and she generally was too.