A beautiful old eight-day clock ticked solemnly
to the flickering of the hall lamp. From below came occasionally a
furtive creaking of the kitchen stairs. The two servants were half way
up them listening. The stairs a flight above the hall also creaked at
intervals. Two young girls, respectively about fourteen and fifteen,
were craning necks out of nightdresses over the balusters in a shadowy
angle of the staircase. On the floor above them three other little girls
of gradually diminishing ages slept, unconscious of the issues being
decided between their big brother and their eldest sister on the one
side, and their father and mother on the other, in the front
parlour below.
That parlour, a room of good size, was unostentatiously furnished with
good bourgeois mahogany. A buxom mahogany chiffonier, a large square
dining-table, a black marble clock with two dials, one being a
barometer, three large oil landscapes of exceedingly umbrageous trees
and glassy lakes, inoffensively uninteresting, more Atlantic liners, and
a large bookcase, apparently filled with serried lines of bound
magazines, and an excellent Brussels carpet of quiet pattern, were
mainly responsible for a general effect of middle-class comfort, in
which, indeed, if beauty had not been included, it had not been wilfully
violated, but merely unthought of.
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