in heaven!... And then the young, sturdy girl, standing over the
old woman and breathing out the very breath of life, vitalizing
everything, rejuvenating the old woman!

Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room had a considerable renown among her
acquaintance, not only for its peculiar charm, which combined and
reconciled the tastes of two very different generations, but also for
its radiant cleanness. There are many clean houses in the Five Towns,
using the adjective in the relative sense in which the Five Towns is
forced by chimneys to use it. But Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room (save for
the white window-curtains, which had to accept the common grey fate of
white window-curtains in the district) was clean in the country-side
sense, almost in the Dutch sense. The challenge of its cleanness
gleamed on every polished surface, victorious in the unending battle
against the horrible contagion of foul industries. Mrs. Maldon's
friends would assert that the state of that sitting-room "passed"
them, or "fair passed" them, and she would receive their ever-amazed
compliments with modesty. But behind her benevolent depreciation she
would be blandly saying to herself: "Yes, I'm scarcely surprised it
passes you--seeing the way you housewives let things go on here."
The word "here" would be faintly emphasized in her mind, as no native
would have emphasized it.

Rachel shared the general estimate of the sitting-room. She
appreciated its charm, and admitted to herself that her first vision
of it, rather less than a month before, had indeed given her a new and
startling ideal of cleanliness. On that occasion it had been evident,
from Mrs. Maldon's physical exhaustion, that the housemistress had
made an enormous personal effort to _dazzle_ and inspire her new
"lady companion," which effort, though detected and perhaps scorned by