antagonistic preoccupied souls and their different affairs, the pathos
and the complexity of human things surged over her and overwhelmed her.




CHAPTER II

MESHACH AND HANNAH


The little old bachelor and spinster were resting after dinner in the
back-parlour of their house near the top of Church Street. In that abode
they had watched generations pass and manners change, as one list
hearthrug succeeded another in the back-parlour. Meshach had been born
in the front bedroom, and he meant to die there; Hannah had also been
born in the front bedroom, but it was through the window of the back
bedroom that the housewife's soul would rejoin the infinite. The house,
which Meshach's grandfather, first of his line to emerge from the grey
mass of the proletariat, had ruined himself to build, was a six-roomed
dwelling of honest workmanship in red brick and tile, with a beautiful
pillared doorway and fanlight in the antique taste. It had cost two
hundred pounds, and was the monument of a life's ambition. Mortgaged by
its hard-pressed creator, and then sold by order of the mortgagee, it
had ultimately been bought again in triumph by Meshach's father, who
made thirty thousand pounds out of pots without getting too big for it,
and left it unspoilt to Meshach and Hannah. Only one alteration had ever
been made in it, and that, completed on Meshach's fiftieth birthday,
admirably exemplified his temperament. Because he liked to observe the
traffic in Church Street, and liked equally to sit in the back-parlour