“I’ve brought a visitor, mother,” she repeated.  “Go on in; I’ll not be a minute finding the form....  Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client from Rio.  He says he’ll join the Men’s League and I’m just going to find him a membership form.”

She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, “Good evening, Mr. Yaverland.  Will you not sit down?  I’m ashamed the hall gas wasn’t lit.”  A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen’s.  The hand that shook his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too gentle-spirited to make complaint.  She was like some brown bird that had not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather.  Yet once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a fire as burned over Ellen’s brows, and she had Ellen’s short upper lip, though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love.  The aged are terrible—­mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.

She struck him as being very old to be Ellen’s mother, for when he had been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so dusty and so meagre.  “Yes, they are very poor,” he groaned to himself.  The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers Bibles—­engravings which they obviously didn’t like, since here and there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered somehow.  And there was nothing pretty anywhere.