Again, beneath Mrs. Maldon’s modesty concerning the merits of her sitting-room Rachael soon fancied that she could detect traces of an ingenuous and possibly senile “house-pride,” which did more than fret the lady companion; it faintly offended her.  That one should be proud of a possession or of an achievement was admissible, but that one should fail to conceal the pride absolutely was to Rachel, with her Five Towns character, a sign of weakness, a sign of the soft South.  Lastly, Mrs. Maldon had, it transpired, her “ways”; for example, in the matter of blinds and in the matter of tapers.  She would actually insist on the gas being lighted with a taper; a paper spill, which was just as good and better, seemed to ruffle her benign placidity:  and she was funnily economical with matches.  Rachel had never seen a taper before, and could not conceive where the old lady managed to buy the things.

In short, with admiration almost undiminished, and with a rapidly growing love and loyalty, Rachel had arrived at the point of feeling glad that she, a mature, capable, sagacious, and strong woman, was there to watch over the last years of the waning and somewhat peculiar old lady.

Mrs. Maldon did not see the situation from quite the same angle.  She did not, for example, consider herself to be in the least peculiar, but, on the contrary, a very normal woman.  She had always used tapers; she could remember the period when every one used tapers.  In her view tapers were far more genteel and less dangerous than the untidy, flaring spill, which she abhorred as a vulgarity.  As for matches, frankly it would not have occurred to her to waste a match when fire was available.  In the matter of her sharp insistence on drawn blinds at night, domestic privacy seemed to be one of the fundamental decencies of life—­simply that!  And as for house-pride, she considered that she locked away her fervent feeling for her parlour in a manner marvellous and complete.

No one could or ever would guess the depth of her attachment to that sitting-room, nor the extent to which it engrossed her emotional life.  And yet she had only occupied the house for fourteen years out of the forty-five years of her widowhood, and the furniture had at intervals been renewed (for Mrs. Maldon would on no account permit herself to be old-fashioned).  Indeed, she had had five different sitting-rooms in five different houses since her husband’s death.  No matter.  They were all the same sitting-room, all rendered identical by the mysterious force of her dreamy meditations on the past.  And, moreover, sundry important articles had remained constant to preserve unbroken the chain that linked her to her youth.  The table which Rachel had so nicely laid was the table at which Mrs. Maldon had taken her first meal as mistress of a house.  Her husband had carved mutton at it, and grumbled about the consistency of toast; her children had spilt jam on its cloth.  And when on Sunday nights she wound up the bracket-clock on the mantelpiece, she could see and hear a handsome young man in a long frock-coat and a large shirt-front and a very thin black tie winding it up too—­her husband—­on Sunday nights.  And she could simultaneously see another handsome young man winding it up—­her son.