She was sitting on a low chair beside the fireplace in the back sitting room, where she and the children spent most of their time. The fire was laid — paper, sticks of wood, lumps of coal, all in neat bumpy layers, ready to blaze up and spit sparks at the touch of a match. The small hearth, of pale greenish tiles, was washed and shone with a dull, clean glow. The hearthrug, thin and fringed, was woven in a dark Oriental pattern of red and green lines, circles, curlicues, and unfinished curves, and all it had in common with the linoleum that covered the floor was that both rug and linoleum were well taken care of. Rug and linoleum looked their best. The rug had been brushed until its worn spots looked hardly less rich than the rich design, and the diligently domestic red-green-and-brown fleur-de-lis pattern in the linoleum was clear as glass. And what it said was “I am a plain, inoffensive piece of linoleum, ready to last for years, even in a house where there are children.” To the right of the fireplace, shelves fitted into a shallow alcove held Mr. Bagot’s library, which included books by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Darwin, Shakespeare, Turgenev, Edgar Wallace, Wolfe Tone, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Chekhov, Ibsen, Molière, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. The books were old for the most part, and well worn, but they were tidy, and at the moment they were nearly hidden from sight by the folding doors that opened the front sitting room and the back sitting room into one quite large room.