to whom even a variation in the position of furniture is unpleasant.
Of course, this peculiarity has its bad side, and yet it is not in
itself mean or ignoble. For is not adhesiveness, faithfulness,
constancy--call it what you will--at the root of all citizenship,
clanship, and family love? Is it not the same feeling which, granting
they remain at all, makes old friendships dearer than any new? Nay,
to go to the very sacredest and closest bond, is it not that which
makes an old man see to the last in his old wife's faded face the
beauty which perhaps nobody ever saw except himself, but which he
sees and delights in still, simply because it is familiar and his
own.

To people who possess a large share of this rare--shall I say
fatal?--characteristic of adhesiveness, living in lodgings is about
the saddest life under the sun. Whether some dim foreboding of this
fact crossed Elizabeth's mind as she stood at the window watching for
her mistresses' first arrival at "home," it is impossible to say. She
could feel, though she was not accustomed to analyze her feelings.
But she looked dull and sad. Not cross, even Ascott could not have
accused her of "savageness."

And yet she had been somewhat tried. First, in going out what she
termed "marketing," she had traversed a waste of streets, got lost
several times, and returned with light weight in her butter, and sand
in her moist sugar; also with the conviction that London tradesmen
were the greatest rogues alive. Secondly, a pottle of strawberries,
which she had bought with her own money to grace the tea-table with
the only fruit Miss Leaf cared for, had turned out a large delusion,
big and beautiful at top, and all below small, crushed, and stale.
She had thrown it indignantly, pottle and all, into the kitchen fire.