The servants threw open two doors on the ground floor, and stood back expectant.  On such an occasion it was proper to look pleased and to give praise.  Anne was fine in her observance of each propriety as she looked into the rooms prepared for her.  The house in Prior Street had not lost its simple old-world look in beautifying itself for the bride.  It had put on new blinds and clean paint, and the smell of spring flowers was everywhere.  The rest was familiar.  She had told Majendie that she liked the old things best.  They appealed to her sense of the fit and the refined; they were signs of good taste and good breeding in her husband’s family and in himself.  The house was a survival, a protest against the terrible all-invading soul of Scale on Humber.

For another reason, which she could not yet analyse, Anne was glad that nothing had been changed for her coming.  It was as if she felt that it would have been hard on Majendie if he had been put to much expense in renovating his house for a woman in whom the spirit of the bride had perished.  The house in Prior Street was only a place for her body to dwell in, for her soul to hide in, only walls around walls, the shell of the shell.

She turned to her husband with a smile that flashed defiance to the invading pathos of her state.  Majendie’s eyes brightened with hope, beholding her admirable behaviour.  He had always thoroughly approved of Anne.

Upstairs, in the room that was her own, poor Edith (the cause, as he felt, of their calamity) had indeed prepared for them with joy.

Majendie’s sister lay on her couch by the window, as they had left her, as they would always find her, not like a woman with a hopelessly injured spine, but like a lady of the happy world, resting in luxury, a little while, from the assault of her own brilliant and fatiguing vitality.  The flat, dark masses of her hair, laid on the dull red of her cushions, gave to her face an abrupt and lustrous whiteness, whiteness that threw into vivid relief the features of expression, the fine, full mouth, with its temperate sweetness, and the tender eyes, dark as the brows that arched them.  Edith, in her motionless beauty, propped on her cushions, had acquired a dominant yet passionless presence, as of some regal woman of the earth surrendered to a heavenly empire.  You could see that, however sanctified by suffering, Edith had still a placid mundane pleasure in her white wrapper of woollen gauze, and in her long lace scarf.  She wore them with an appearance of being dressed appropriately for a superb occasion.

The sign of her delicacy was in her hands, smoothed and wasted with inactivity.  Yet they had an energy of their own.  The hands and the weak, slender arms had a surprising way of leaping up to draw to her all beloved persons who bent above her couch.  They leapt now to her brother and his wife, and sank, fatigued with their effort.  Two frail, nervous hands embraced Majendie’s, till one of them let go, as she remembered Anne, and held her, too.