“You’ve been such a while, I made sure you didn’t mean coming at all,” she at last condescended to answer, when they were in the kitchen—a queer-shaped room with a sloping and knotted floor, a window that looked out at nothing more inspiring than the side of a barn, and another, which held the ferns, overlooking the street. It was gloomy, like everything at Emma’s, and Mrs. Clapham, who was usually so neat on her feet, found herself first kicking the dresser, then bumping the table, and finally catching her toe in the torn rug. She was thoroughly flustered by the time she had sat herself down in the chair indicated by Emma, while the fact that Emma herself did not sit down, but remained standing beside the table, disquieted her more than ever. But then, as she and Mrs. Tanner had already agreed, Emma never _did_ sit down. Even at night you could not think of her as sitting in front of the fire, knitting, perhaps, or simply dreaming of old times. Even at that hour she felt sure she would be on the watch, stealing about the house and peering into the rooms. Standing by empty beds, too, Mrs. Clapham thought, with a shiver, and possibly pretending to herself that they had suddenly been re-filled.... Seated uneasily in her chair, she hardly knew where to turn, for, repugnant as she always found it to look at Emma, it was even more distressing to look at the room. It was always something of a trial to her to go into other folks’ “spots,” because they so seldom came up to her personal standard. More than once, when calling upon a sick neighbour, she had scrubbed the house from ceiling to floor; not so much out of sheer kindness—sometimes, indeed, in spite of protest—but because of the thirst for perfection by which she was driven. So now, seeing in spite of herself the dirty windows and floor, the unpolished brasses and steels, she positively ached for bare arms and an old frock, a new brush and a full pail. Time and again she found her hands stealing unconsciously to her tidy cuffs.... It was strange how totally different slovenly houses could be, though houses that were thoroughly clean were much the same. It was astonishing, for instance, how Emma’s dirty home differed from Martha Jane’s. The latter was dirty, of course, even dirtier than this, and certainly it was a great deal poorer. Yet even at its worst there was always a dashing touch about Martha Jane’s—the glint of a cheap brooch flung carelessly on a table, or the gaudiness of an Easter egg swinging crookedly from a bracket. Once, indeed, at the turn of the year, Mrs. Clapham had seen through the open door a bunch of snowdrops in a broken glass....