I followed him upstairs. Late as it was, one of the Inn laundresses--those travesties of women, all flesh, sacking apron, and dusty hair--was scrubbing the third floor flight. Saturday is the great day for stair scrubbing. She moved her pail for us to pass and looked at Orion’s face curiously. As we went up we were followed by the rasping swish of her brush. Mrs. Grigg’s servant was waiting in the sitting room. She had seated herself. Orion did not seem to like this. It was such a swell room--all varnish, gewgaws, and rose-colored lights. He had stuck squares of leather paper on the panels of the walls and put white porcelain finger plates painted with roses on the doors. He burned gas in the grate instead of coal--it was cleaner. It looked like an old maid’s room. I believe that he helped his laundress to clean it. She was a rather clean woman herself, who always wore a stiff bow of white muslin tied under her chin. There was a shiny sideboard, on top of which was set out the electro plate. The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had flung his glass at it on the night of the party--as a graceful return for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew--she served in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road--had skillfully painted a cobweb and a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson afterward. “A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice. He was always saying it. He never said more than three things at the same period. He had attacks of sentences and worked them off. He said it every time you went to his set. He said it to all new acquaintances. He took them in to look at the sideboard, and while they looked he enlarged on the rank villainy of Pearson. I actually waited for him to say it on that Saturday night. But he didn’t. He only lifted the old woman’s leg of mutton from the center table where she had set it. It was foreign meat and the blood had run out freely, pulping the newspaper and making a patch on the tablecloth. He carried it, with an air of reproof, to the cupboard and set it carefully on a dish. The woman looked at him and then she looked at me. There was defiance and self-vindication and a lurking terror on her face. It was a long, horselike face, I remember. People of her class always look like that when anything suspicious occurs. She seemed to be saying in a terrified, insolent way: “Don’t you think I did it, because I didn’t.” It is pathetic; this perpetual assertion of innocence--before they are accused--of such people.