decrepit, senile skin, which seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance.  The cast of her features was benign.  She had passed through desolating and violent experiences, and then through a long, long period of withdrawn tranquillity; and from end to end of her life she had consistently thought the best of all men, refusing to recognize evil and assuming the existence of good.  Every one of the millions of her kind thoughts had helped to mould the expression of her countenance.  The expression was definite now, fixed, intensely characteristic after so many decades, and wherever it was seen it gave pleasure and by its enchantment created goodness and goodwill—­even out of their opposites.  Such was the life-work of Mrs. Maldon.

Her eyes embraced the whole room.  They did not, as the phrase is, “beam” approval; for the act of beaming involves a sort of ecstasy, and Mrs. Maldon was too dignified for ecstasy.  But they displayed a mild and proud contentment as she said—­

“I’m sure it’s all very nice.”

It was.  The table crowded with porcelain, crystal, silver, and flowers, and every object upon it casting a familiar curved shadow on the whiteness of the damask toward the window!  The fresh crimson and blues of the everlasting Turkey carpet (Turkey carpet being the ne plus ultra of carpetry in the Five Towns, when that carpet was bought, just as sealskin was the ne plus ultra of all furs)!  The silken-polished sideboard, strange to the company, but worthy of it, and exhibiting a due sense of its high destiny!  The sombre bookcase and corner cupboard, darkly glittering!  The Chesterfield sofa, broad, accepting, acquiescent!  The flashing brass fender and copper scuttle!  The comfortably reddish walls, with their pictures—­like limpets on the face of precipices!  The new-whitened ceiling!  In the midst the incandescent lamp that hung like the moon in heaven!...  And then the young, sturdy girl, standing over the old woman and breathing out the very breath of life, vitalizing everything, rejuvenating the old woman!

Mrs. Maldon’s sitting-room had a considerable renown among her acquaintance, not only for its peculiar charm, which combined and reconciled the tastes of two very different generations, but also for its radiant cleanness.  There are many clean houses in the Five Towns, using the adjective in the relative sense in which the Five Towns is forced by chimneys to use it.  But Mrs. Maldon’s sitting-room (save for the white window-curtains, which had to accept the common grey fate of white window-curtains in the district) was clean in the country-side sense, almost in the Dutch sense.  The challenge of its cleanness gleamed on every polished surface, victorious in the unending battle against the horrible contagion of foul industries.  Mrs. Maldon’s friends would assert that the state of that sitting-room “passed” them, or “fair passed” them, and she would receive their ever-amazed compliments with modesty.  But behind her benevolent depreciation she would be blandly saying to herself:  “Yes, I’m scarcely surprised it passes you—­seeing the way you housewives let things go on here.”  The word “here” would be faintly emphasized in her mind, as no native would have emphasized it.