have been long ago settled in its position. No one could mistake the
room for that of young people. There was something in the multitude of
worn objects, their solidity, their position in the room, each
accommodating the other so that one could think of no other place for
any of them, in the polish which had worn into the heart of the wood by
constant rubbing which betrayed the presence and passage of many people
through the room for many years; a used, comfortable, taken-care-of
appearance, very pleasant to feel around one, a room from which one
would not easily take oneself away at night and which seemed to Anne
Hilton to set around her the company of many cheerful people.

Mrs Crowther was too much occupied with her own affairs, and too eager
to talk to enquire what had brought Anne Hilton that way. She was a
tall, spare, robust woman, the mother of nine children, all grown up and
well placed. She was a "worker." She had considered the bearing and
rearing of her children as a piece of work to be done, in the same way
in which she looked upon the spring-cleaning of her house. It had been
done to her satisfaction, and done well. She had had little time for
sentiment in her married life, but now, still active, strong, and with
only the work of her house and garden, the meals for her four sons who
still lived at home, and their mending and washing, she had leisure to
express her opinions, and always having been obliged to hold her
imagination within the visible realities of life and death, with which
all her life had been concerned, she had arrived at a definiteness of
judgment, and an honesty of speech which one frequently finds among
women of her class out of reach of poverty, but not beyond the necessity
of work. Her husband was not a country man, but had come from a town
florist's to work with a nurseryman about two miles distant. She began
to tell Anne Hilton how they had first come to the country.