The headboard and footboard of the iron bedstead stood against the wall together like a corpse cast aside and unburied. On the floor in the very middle of the room lay the springs, and upon it the worn and soiled mattress, hardly recognizable by that name now because of the marks of heavy, muddy shoes, as if it had been not only slept upon but walked over with shoes straight from the contact of the street in bad weather. Sheets there were none, and the pillow soiled and with a hole burnt in one corner of its ticking lay guiltless of a pillow-case, with a beaten, sodden impression of a head in its centre. There was a snarl of soiled blanket and torn patchwork quilt across the foot, tossed to one side; and all about this excuse for a bed was strewn the most heterogeneous mass of objects that Cornelia had ever seen collected. Clothes soiled and just from the laundry, all in one mass, neckties tangled among books and letters, cheap magazines and parts of automobiles, a silk hat and a white evening vest keeping company with a pair of greasy overalls and two big iron wrenches; and over everything cigarette-stumps. The desolation was complete. The bureau had turned its back to the scene in despair, and was face to the wall, as it had been placed by the movers. It was then and not till then that Cornelia understood how recent had been the moving, and how utter the rout of the poor, patient mother, whose wonderful housekeeping had always been the boast of the neighborhood where they had lived, and whose fastidiousness had been almost an obsession.