“Oh, shut up!  I’m comin’,” bawled the girl in reply.  “You better sit over there by the winder, Mister,” she told her visitor, hastily.  “There’s a breeze there, maybe.  You’ll find to-day’s paper an’ a fan on the table.”  She vanished, and he could hear her running kitchenward, and the shrieking voice subsiding into a whine.

Mr. Chadwick Champneys slumped limply into a chair.  Everything he looked at added to his sense of astonishment and unease.

The outside of the house hadn’t lied:  the inside matched it.  Mr. Champneys found himself staring and being stared at by the usual crayon portraits of defunct members of the family,—­at least he hoped they were defunct,—­the man with a long mule face and neck whiskers; and opposite him his spouse, with her hair worn like mustard-plasters on the skull.  “Male and female created He them.”  Placed so that you had to see it the moment you entered the door, on a white-and-gold easel draped with a silkoline scarf trimmed with pink crocheted wheels, was a virulently colored landscape with a house of unknown architecture in the foreground, and mother-of-pearl puddles outside the gate.  Mr. Champneys studied those mother-of-pearl puddles gravely.  They hurt his feelings.  So did the ornate golden-oak parlor set upholstered in red plush; and the rug on the floor, in which colors fought like Kilkenny cats; and a pink vase with large purple plums bunched on it; and the figured wall-paper, and the unclean lace curtains, and the mantel loaded with sorry plunder, and the clothespin butterflies, the tissue-paper parasols, and the cheap fans tacked to the walls.  It was a hot and dusty room.  The smell of bad cooking, of countless miserable meals eaten by men whose digestion they would ruin, clung to it and would not be gainsaid.  Mr. Champneys thought the best thing that could happen to such houses would be a fire beginning in the cellar and ending at the roof.

His mind went back to another house—­an old white house in South Carolina, set in spacious grounds, with high-ceilinged, cool, large rooms filled with fine old furniture, a few pictures, glimpses of brass and silver, large windows opening upon lawns and trees and shrubs and flowers, a flash of blue river, a vista of green marshes melting into the cobalt sky.  A stately, lovely, leisurely old house, typifying the stately, leisurely life that had called it into being; both gone irrevocably into the past.  He sighed.

He looked about this atrocious room, and his jaw hardened.  This, for Milly’s niece!  Poor girl, poor friendless girl!  He had known, of course, that the girl was poor.  He and Milly had been poor, too.  But, oh, never like this!  This was being poor sordidly, vulgarly.  He had seen and suffered enough in his time to realize how soul-murdering this environment might be to one who knew nothing better.  He himself had had the memory of the old house in which he was born, and of low-voiced, gentle-mannered men and women; he had had his fine traditions to which to hold fast.  He reflected that he would have a great deal to make up for to Nancy Simms!