She amused herself for a while seeing how easily the cupboards opened and locked, how the drawers ran on a grain of silk and the beds slid on smooth wheels. Sound workmanship throughout—that was the hall-mark of the house; dry walls, firm floors, well-fitting windows, furniture of the best. Again and again she said to herself that it was all exactly what might have been looked for from old Mr. T. And always first and foremost he had thought of the houses as places where old folks would have to live. The windows, therefore, were broad but low, so that no clean-curtain-loving house-wife should be tempted to dally with a pair of “steps.” The foundations were good, but there were no cellars into which shaky old legs, descending daily, could do their best to break shaky old necks. Coal-house and larder were both within easy reach of the kitchen, and there, as everywhere, all the floors ran level. Nowhere was there a sudden step going down or up; not even a passing unevenness that might possibly stub old toes. Old Mr. T. had known that half the quarrels among women are conducted from the safe standing-ground of their own thresholds; so, as far as possible, he had set the doors of his almshouses back to back. His whole object, indeed, had been to make the old folk feel private, without ever letting them feel alone; and although he had been bound to make the wash-house in common (always a fearful source of anguish of soul) he had hedged it about with terrific instructions which only the thoroughly graceless would dare to break. But, in spite of Mrs. Bell’s intimidating list, the wash-house was almost the only thing about which there was any definite rule. Old Mr. T. had known that you can generally trust a decent woman to look after a decent house, but that, where wash-houses are concerned, no woman living is always perfectly sane. He had known, too, that old folk usually like to see a “bit of life,” and that nothing bores them so much as to be shut away to look at nothing. So wherever he could he had put the kitchen to face the road, defying the social tenet which says that this is the sole privilege of the parlour. He knew that the old, who had stopped running about on their own account in life, could weave chapters on end about somebody running about with a Gladstone bag. With all their experience, all their knowledge of human nature behind them, it seemed hard to him that they should not use it. Age is the natural harvest-time for the observer and looker-on, and it would have seemed as cruel to him to have denied it its fruit, as to deny dancing and singing to buoyant youth.