Virginia knelt on the cushioned seat in the bay-window of her bedroom, gazing expectantly down on the pavement below. It was her forty-fifth birthday, and she was impatiently waiting for Harry, who was coming home for a few days before going abroad to finish his studies at Oxford. The house was a new, impeccably modern dwelling, produced by a triumph of the utilitarian genius of the first decade of the twentieth century, and Oliver had bought it at a prodigious price a few years after his dramatic success had lifted him from poverty into comfort. The girls, charmed to have made the momentous passage into Sycamore Street, were delighted with the space and elegance of their new home, but Virginia had always felt somehow as if she were visiting. The drawing-room, and especially the butler's pantry, awed her. She had not dared to wash those august shelves with soda, nor to fasten her favourite strips of white oilcloth along their shining surfaces. The old joy of "fixing up" her storeroom had been wrested from her by the supercilious mulatto butler, who wore immaculate shirt fronts, but whom she suspected of being untidy beneath his magnificent exterior. Once when she had discovered a bucket of apple-parings tucked away under the sink, where it had stood for days, he had given "notice" so unexpectedly and so haughtily that she had been afraid ever since to look under dish-towels or into hidden places while he was absent. Out of the problem of the South "the servant question" had arisen to torment and intimidate the housekeepers of Dinwiddie; and inferior service at high wages was regarded of late as a thing for which one had come to be thankful. Had they still lived in the little house, Virginia would gladly have done her work for the sake of the peace and the cleanliness which it would have ensured; but since the change in their circumstances, Oliver and the girls had grown so dependent upon the small luxuries of living that she put up with anything--even with the appalling suspicion that every mouthful she ate was not clean--rather than take the risk of having her three servants desert in a body. When she had unwisely complained to Oliver, he had remarked impatiently that he couldn't be bothered about the housekeeping, and Lucy had openly accused her of being "fussy."