Helen abandoned the Windsor chair and tried the arm-chair, and then stood up.

“Which chair do you recommend?” she asked, nicely.

“Bless ye, child!  I never sit here, except at th’ desk.  I sit in the kitchen.”

A peculiarity of houses in the Five Towns is that rooms are seldom called by their right names.  It is a point of honour, among the self-respecting and industrious classes, to prepare a room elaborately for a certain purpose, and then not to use it for that purpose.  Thus James Ollerenshaw’s sitting-room, though surely few apartments could show more facilities than it showed for sitting, was not used as a sitting-room, but as an office.  The kitchen, though it contained a range, was not used as a kitchen, but as a sitting-room.  The scullery, though it had no range, was filled with a gas cooking-stove and used as a kitchen.  And the back yard was used as a scullery.  This arrangement never struck anybody as singular; it did not strike even Helen as singular.  Her mother’s house had exhibited the same oddness until she reorganised it.  If James Ollerenshaw had not needed an office, his sitting-room would have languished in desuetude.  The fact is that the thrifty inhabitants of the Five Towns save a room as they save money.  If they have an income of six rooms they will live on five, or rather in five, and thereby take pride to themselves.

Somewhat nervous, James feigned to glance at the rent books on the desk.

Helen’s eye swept the room.  “I suppose you have a good servant?” she said.

“I have a woman as comes in,” said James.  “But her isn’t in th’ house at the moment.”

This latter statement was a wilful untruth on James’s part.  He had distinctly caught a glimpse of Mrs. Butt’s figure as he entered.

“Well,” said Helen, kindly, “it’s quite nice, I’m sure.  You must be very comfortable—­for a man.  But, of course, one can see at once that no woman lives here.”

“How?” he demanded, naively.

“Oh,” she answered, “I don’t know.  But one can.”

“Dost mean to say as it isn’t clean, lass?”

“The brasses are very clean,” said Helen.

Such astonishing virtuosity in the art of innuendo is the privilege of one sex only.

“Come into th’ kitchen, lass,” said James, after he had smiled into a corner of the room, “and take off them gloves and things.”

“But, great-stepuncle, I can’t stay.”

“You’ll stop for tea,” said he, firmly, “or my name isn’t James Ollerenshaw.”

He preceded her into the kitchen.  The door between the kitchen and the scullery was half-closed; in the aperture he again had a momentary, but distinct, glimpse of the eye of Mrs. Butt.

“I do like this room,” said Helen, enthusiastically.

“Uninterrupted view o’ th’ back yard,” said Ollerenshaw.  “Sit ye down, lass.”