bellrope had broken, and it now lay invertebrate; by the window,
catching a shaft of sunlight, stood a drain pipe painted with a
landscape in cobalt-blue and probably once used as an umbrella stand.

"That's all I got for two months' rent," said Mrs. Cleghorne bitterly,
surveying it. "And it's just about fit for my old man to go and bury his
good-for-nothing lazy head in, and that's all. The bedroom's in here, of
course." She opened the folding doors whose blebs of paint had been
picked off up to a certain height above the floor, possibly as far as
some child had been able to reach.

The bedroom was rather dustier than the sitting-room, and it was much
darker owing to a number of ferns which had been glued upon the
window-panes. Through this mesh could be seen the nettle-haunted square
of back garden; and beyond, over a stucco wall pocked with small
pebbles, a column of smoke was belching into the sky from a stationary
engine on the invisible lake of railway lines.

"Do you want to see the top-floor back?" Mrs. Cleghorne asked.

"Well, if you wouldn't mind." Michael felt bound to apologize to her,
whatever was suggested.

She sighed her way upstairs, and at last flung open a door for them to
enter the vacant room.

The view from here was certainly more spacious, and a great deal of the
permeating depression was lightened by looking out as it were over
another city across the railway, a city with streamers of smoke, and
even here and there a flag flying. At the same time the room itself was
less potentially endurable than the ground-floor; there was no fireplace
and the few scraps of furniture were more discouraging than the positive
emptiness downstairs. Michael shuddered as he looked at the gimcrack
washstand through whose scanty paint the original wood was visible in
long fibrous sores. He shuddered, too, at the bedstead with its pleated
iron laths furred by dust and rust, and at the red mattress exuding
flock like clustered maggots.

"This is furnished, of course," said Mrs. Cleghorne, complacently
sucking a tooth. "Well, which will you have?"

"I think perhaps I'll take the ground-floor rooms. I'll have them done
up."

"Oh, they're quite clean. The last people was a bit dirty. So I gave
them an extra-special clear-out."

"But you wouldn't object to my doing them up?" persisted Michael.

"Oh, no, I shouldn't _object,"_ said Mrs. Cleghorne, and in her accent
was the suggestion that equally she would not b