The Ramsey house was the original old homestead of the family.  It was unspeakably decrepit and fallen from a former high estate.  The old house presented to Maria’s fancy something in itself degraded and loathsome.  It seemed to partake actually of the character of its inmates—­to be stained and swollen and out of plumb with unmentionable sins of degeneration.  It was a very poisonous fungus of a house, with blotches of paint here and there, with its front portico supported drunkenly on swaying pillars, with its roof hollowed about the chimney, with great stains here and there upon the walls, which seemed like stains of sin rather than of old rains.  Maria marched straight to the house, leading Jessy, with Mamie and Franky at her heels.  She knocked on the door; there was no bell, of course.  But Franky pushed past her and opened the door, and sang out, in his raucous voice: 

“Hullo, mummer!  Mummer!”

Mamie echoed him in her equally raucous voice, full of dissonances.  “Mummer!  Mummer!”

A woman, large and dirty, but rather showily clad, with a brave display of cheap jewelry, appeared in the doorway of a room on the right, from which also issued a warm, spirituous odor, mingled with onions and boiling meat.  The woman, who had at one time been weakly pretty, and even now was not bad-looking, stared with a sort of vacant defiance at Maria.

“It’s teacher, mummer,” volunteered Mamie.

Franky chuckled again, and again whistled.  Franky’s chuckles and whistles were characteristic of him.  He often disturbed the school in such fashion.

Maria had a vision of a man in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside a red-hot stove, on which boiled the meat and onions.  She began at once upon her errand.

“How do you do, Mrs. Ramsey?” said she.

The woman mumbled something inarticulate and backed a little.  The man in the room leaned forward and rolled bloodshot eyes at her.  Maria began at once.  She had much of her mother’s spirit, which, when it was aroused, balked at nothing.  She pointed at Jessy, then she extended her small index-finger severely at Mrs. Ramsey.

“Mrs. Ramsey,” said she, and she stood so straight that she looked much taller, her blue eyes flashed like steel at the slinking ones of the older woman, “I want to inquire why you sent this child to school such a day as this in such a condition?”

Mrs. Ramsey again murmured something inarticulate and backed still farther.  Maria followed her quite into the room.  A look of insolent admiration became evident in the bloodshot eyes of the man beside the stove.  Maria had no false modesty when she was righteously incensed.  She would have said just the same before a room full of men.

“That child,” she said, and she again pointed at Jessy, shivering in her little, scanty frock—­“that child came to school to-day without any clothing under her dress; one of the coldest days of the year, too.  I don’t see what you are thinking of, you, her own mother, to let a child go out in such a condition!  You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”