The Rectory was a red house standing in a garden, which its inhabitants, one and all, energetically declared not to be damp; from which the stranger might gather that they were not so certain on the subject as it would be well to be. Its doors were quite level with the ground, so that you walked in, without the interval even of a step to raise you above the drippings of the rain: and as the drawing-room windows also opened down to the ground, it was rather a trying business in wet weather, and kept both the housemaid and the family much on the alert. The two girls went in through the open window, for the afternoon was quite bright and fair, and no fear of rain: but they found nobody in the drawing-room, which was low and rather dark, notwithstanding those two good-sized French windows, which somehow seemed to keep the light within themselves, and did not distribute it to the further side of the drab-coloured wall; this, unornamented with pictures or any variety, afforded a dingy background for the somewhat dingy couches and easy-chairs, which were covered with brownish chintz, intended to keep clean, or in franker language, ‘not to show the dirt’ for as long a period as possible. Chintzes and wall papers, and even dresses, which were calculated not to show the dirt, were very popular at the time Mrs. Plowden married, as means of economy, and her daughters had been brought up in that tenet of faith. Accordingly everything in the room was more or less of this dingy drab complexion, which was not exhilarating to the spirits. There were signs that the room had been recently occupied by the untidiness of the loose cover of one of the sofas, which bore evident signs that some one had been lying there, and had jumped up hastily, and apparently fled, since the old novel he or she had been reading lay open on its face on the floor, and the antimacassars with which the sofa had been adorned were huddled up in limp bundles, and lay here and there where restless shoulders or limbs had left them. Florence gave her cousin a look as she picked up the book and spread out the forlorn adornments on the arm and back of the sofa. ‘They were put on quite fresh two days ago, and look at them!’ said poor Florry; they were chiefly in crochet, and the work of her own hands. ‘He has been here,’ she said, ‘and papa has called him to see if he was at work. Papa might just as well let it alone, for he is never at work; but that is what they will not learn,’ said Florence, impatient of the blindness of her parents. ‘We,’ she added, ‘have to put the room tidy after him a dozen times a day; but I prefer him to be in the drawing-room, for at least he can’t smoke here----’ ‘If he is out,’ said Mab, ‘let us go, Florry: we have lost half the afternoon already.’