creditors. She was a happy woman.

Henry loved March Square. There was a window in an upstairs passage from
behind whose glass he could gaze at the passing world. The Passing
World!... the shrouded house behind him. One was as alive, as bustling,
as demonstrative to him as the other, but between the two there was, for
him, no communication. His attitude to the Square and the people in it
was that he knew more about them than anyone else did; his attitude to
the House, that he knew nothing at all compared with what "They" knew.
In the Square he could see through the lot of them, so superficial were
they all; in the House he could only wait, with fingers on lip, for the
next revelation that they might vouchsafe to him.

Doors were, for the most part, locked, yet there were many days when
fires were lit because the house was an old one, and damp Lady Cathcart
had a horror of.

Always for young Henry the house wore its buried and abandoned air. He
was never to see it when the human beings in it would count more than
its furniture, and the human life in it more than the house itself. He
had come, a year and a half ago, into the very place that his dreams
had, from the beginning, built for him. Those large, high rooms with the
shining floors, the hooded furniture, the windows gaping without their
curtains, the shadows and broad squares of light, the little whispers
and rattles that doors and cupboards gave, the swirl of the wind as it
sprang released from corners and crevices, the lisp of some whisper,
"I'm coming! I'm coming! I'm coming!" that, nevertheless, again and
again defeated expectation. How could he but enjoy the fine field of
affection that these provided for him?