Ah! How remorselessly the stream swept away all the debris of winter it could reach! As Joanna watched it in fascination she was one with it, and she rejoiced. Her life – was it not as that flood? Was it not muddy, littered, unlike the life she would have imagined or chosen? But it was a life. It moved. It possessed the impulse, the impetus, the inner fount of desire – not of mere detached wishes that succeed each other capriciously, but of desire that springs from some undiscoverable source, and is imperious as the waters in spring-time. If only she had the courage to obey her true desire always, would she not be purged ultimately of all her falseness? This at least was her scarcely articulate faith.

At the Urquharts, a charwoman, disguised against her will as a housemaid, admitted Joanna and led the way stealthily down a long, dark and stuffy passage. Even in the darkness the solid tastelessness of the dwelling was made known, and there were many traces of that kind of careful spirit (as different from simple thriftiness as from poverty) which cannot endure to let outward show correspond with reduced circumstances.

At the far end of the passage they came to the dining-room, and as she entered, Joanna’s sense of oppression was increased by the sight of a large table, spread (solely, as it seemed, in her honour) with so many specimens of tea-bread that it looked like an exhibition of bakery. She could not have told why, but the plated tea-baskets at the corners, the great abundance of rock-cakes, the tall, forbidding tea-pot on its beaded mat, and the chairs of horse-hair and very ruddy mahogany which had been pushed up to the damask, did undoubtedly combine rather in the cold effort to defy criticism than in any spontaneous hospitality.

But as Mrs. Urquhart crossed the room to greet her, Joanna was fully enlightened. Here was the source of suffocation in the house. Here in this woman with the large, pale, comely face, the beautiful snow-white hair, of an astonishing thickness (at one time no doubt, black like her son’s), and the great, cashmere bosom, surmounted by a heavy, gold brooch like a snake coiled and knotted. In her large, comely whiteness, Mrs. Urquhart seemed to Joanna to absorb light and oxygen as might some powerfully succulent plant. Anything staying beside her for long, must surely yield up its share and languish. Though one of the two windows was open at the top, Joanna could have cried out for air as her hostess bore down upon her.