No. 44 was the most respectable house in the street. Its red-brick front was cleaner than the other fronts. Its parlour window was unbroken and was decorated with clean curtains of Nottingham lace. Its door was freshly painted black. Its owner Jack McPhillip, the bricklayer, had already begun the ascent from the working class to the middle class. He was a Socialist and chairman of his branch of the trade union, but a thoroughly respectable, conservative Socialist, utterly fanatical in his hatred of the status of a working man. The whole house was in keeping with his views on life. The door opened on a little narrow hall, with the stair-way rising midway in it. The stair-way was spotlessly clean, with brightly polished brass rods holding down the well-washed linoleum carpet that struggled upwards rigidly to the top of it. From the door, in daytime, the backyard could be seen. In the backyard there were outhouses and stables, for Jack McPhillip kept a yellow she-goat, three pigs, a flock of white hens and a little pony and trap, in which he was in the habit of driving out into the country on Sundays, in summer, with his wife, to visit his wife’s relatives at Talmuc. To the right of the hall there were two doors. The first door opened into the parlour. In the parlour there was a piano, eight chairs of all sizes and sorts, innumerable photographs, “ornaments,” and absolutely no room for anybody to move about without touching something or other. The second door opened into the kitchen, a large clean room with a cement floor, an open grate and a narrow bed in the corner farthest from the door. The bed belonged to old Ned Lawless, the epileptic relative of Mrs. McPhillip. He lived in the house and received his meals and half a crown per week, in exchange for his labours in looking after the backyard. He was never clean, the only dirty thing in the house. On the second floor there were three rooms. One was used by the old couple. The second by the only daughter Mary, a girl of twenty-one who worked in the city as a clerk, in the offices of Gogarty and Hogan, solicitors and commissioners for oaths. The third room, opening on the backyard, had been closed for six months. It had been Francis’s bedroom. That evening he had just entered it to go to bed when the police arrived.