She looked up and across at the door.

A curtain of white net hung across the upper part of the door, and at first she could not see anything through it. Then she saw what looked like a squashed black box. It was moving restlessly about. It seemed to be trying to peer through the letter box, for it bobbed down, and the letter box suddenly bent inwards. Two eyes, vaguely set in what looked like crumpled reddish-brown paper, stared at her for an instant. Then, apparently in panic, they vanished. The letter box clicked to. The squashed box reappeared, dodging about; and the dab on the knocker was repeated.

She got up and opened the door.

There, looking very ready to run away, stood the tiniest and dirtiest old woman in the world, wearing a coat and skirt so stained, ragged and filthy that it did not look like a coat and skirt any more; it looked like a part of her, and so did the squashed black box that was her hat, and her enormous broken shoes.

She was tiny as a goblin, not more than four feet and a few inches high. Two faded blue eyes, bright with the moisture of old age, shone out of her crumpled toothless face; and she smelled of ancient dirt.

Sophia, feeling sick with pity and the smell, smiled down from her tall height at the terrified old face and said:

‘Good morning.’

‘Good mornin’, dear,’ said the old woman, breaking into an amazed, watery, tremulous smile; evidently she had expected to be kicked or hit on the head.

An embarrassed pause followed.

Sophia wondered where her purse was, as the old woman had evidently come to beg. The old woman seemed to be caught in the toils of language, like many a greater soul before her. She twisted her coat in two awful little worn hands, twisted her mouth, looked piteously at Sophia and was silent.

‘Can I do anything for you?’ asked Sophia at last, adding quickly, ‘I mean, you mustn’t mind. Can I help at all? Would you’ (she looked ruefully round at the breakfast table and at her pretty cups wreathed with cherries) ‘would you like a cup of tea?’

She did not at all want the old woman to drink out of one of her cups. She would make it very dirty. Her appearance and smell had already, Sophia resignedly realized, put Sophia off her breakfast.

But she thought firmly about Sir Philip Sidney and Keats, and repeated loudly.

‘A nice cup of tea? There’s one here, all ready.’

‘Thank you, dear. Thank you very much, dear. Aow, you are good to me. It ain’t that, dear. I was just wonderin’ … Mrs Carmody, she was ’ere last summer, she give me the step to clean, see? The young lady she see me in the ’Igh Street last night, see, and she says there was someone ’ere again, so I jus’ wondered if I could do the step, see? It gets very dirty, bein’ so near the road. That would be a ’elp, see?’