The women flew at the house with hot water and soda. Jack and Somers spent the morning removing bedsteads into the shed, tearing down the horrid rag-and-dirt screens, pulling out the nails with which these screens had been held in place, and pulling out the hundreds of nails which had nailed down the dirt-grey, thin carpet as if forever to the floor of the big room. Then they banged and battered this thin old patternless carpet, and washed it with soda and water. And then they banged and battered the two sofas, that were like sandbags, so full of sand and dust. And they took down all the ugly, dirt filmed pictures of the Dana Gibson sort, and the “My refuge is in God” text. “I should think so,” said Jack. “Away from the muck they’d made down here.” Like demons the four of them flew at this _Coo-ee_ house, and afternoon saw Jack and Somers polishing floors with a stuff called glowax, and Harriet and Victoria putting clean papers on all the shelves, and arranging the battered remnant of well-washed white crockery. “The crockery is the worst item here,” said Victoria. “You pay three-and-six and four shillings for one of these cups and saucers, and four-and-six for a common brown quart jug, and twelve guineas for a white dinner service.” Harriet looked at the horrid breakable stuff aghast. “I feel like buying a tin mug at once,” she said. But Victoria did not bother. She took it all as it came. The people with the eleven children had paid three and a half guineas a week for seven months for the house. At three o’clock Victoria’s brother, a shy youth of seventeen, arrived in a buggy and drove Jack and Victoria away the four miles to the home of the latter. Somers and Harriet had tea alone. “But I love and adore the place,” said Harriet. “Victoria says we can have it for thirty shillings a week, and if they’d let you off even half of the month for Torestin, we should be saving.” The Callcotts arrived home in the early dark. “Oh, but doesn’t the house smell different,” cried Victoria. “Beeswax and turps,” said Jack. “Not a bad smell.” Again the evening passed quietly. Jack had not been his own boisterous self at all. He was silent, and you couldn’t get at him. Victoria looked at him curiously, wondering, and tried to draw him out. He laughed and was pleasant enough, but relapsed into silence, as if he were sad, or gloomy.