Then they took me to look all over the house.  It was an absurd house.  Of its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons’s study was over the kitchen.  Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy’s study that would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay.  And Mrs. Pavitt knew a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the kitchen when they weren’t there.

They showed me the little bits of furniture they’d got.  Jevons had a passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of drawers with brass handles.  She pointed out the brass handles.

I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me all these things because there wasn’t and there hadn’t been, and perhaps there never would be anybody else to tell them to.  I thought of the mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who were married, who had been married so differently.  There was something queer, something wrong about it all.  I believe the very workmen felt that it was so and were sorry for her.

When they had all gone away at six o’clock Jevons and I took our coats off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted all the linen and the blankets.  And at nine o’clock we dined on bacon that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom, wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his mother’s sister who had brought him up.  He said that jug was all that Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.

I was left with Viola in the kitchen to wash up while Jevons finished what he called his man’s job upstairs.

She took advantage of his absence to implore me to go down to Canterbury and make it right for her with her people.  She said they’d believe anything I told them and there wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do for me.

“Tell them,” she said, “that Jimmy’s going to be so horribly celebrated that they’ll look perfect asses if they don’t acknowledge him.”

I owned there was something in it.  She said there was everything in it.  And I promised her I’d go and do what I could.

Then I went upstairs to help Jevons to finish his man’s job.  I found him in the bedroom, making up a bed on the floor.  The carpenter had taken away the bedstead and the posts and left him nothing but the mattress and the tester with its roof of rosebud chintz.  He had propped the tester up against the wall where he said he could see it last thing before he went to sleep and first thing when he woke up.