None of this was very serious, but it made a great difference to Abner. He was continually being shocked to find that small details in the arrangement of the house, such as the position of a chair which had always been his favourite, were being altered from day to day. Alice had a fever for making freakish variations in the kitchen furniture. She couldn’t be happy to see things in the same place for two days running. She was never satisfied, making alterations, as it seemed, simply for the sake of finding fresh work to do, yet always working under protest. Her presence became dragged and unhappy, and the only results of her unnatural labours were untidiness and confusion. Even John Fellows could not help being irritated by these fruitless activities. His first wife, and later Mrs Moseley, had known that it was as much as their lives were worth not to have the house swept and speckless by evening ready to receive the pit dirt of the master. Now, when he came home to find Alice crouching over the fireplace in her bulged apron smearing red raddle on the hearth without as much as a kettle boiling, he would stand still in the doorway, a short, aggressive figure, and ask the wench what she thought she was doing croodled down there in the grate and him waiting for his tea. Then Alice, with her pale face averted, would snarl back at him and his dirt in the high-pitched voice in which she used to gossip with Mrs Hobbs, three doors down. All the women in Hackett’s Cottages eventually developed the same sort of voice.