The lodge-door was like a common garden-door; on one side of it were great closed gates for the ingress and egress of lurries and wagons.  The lodge-keeper admitted them into a great oblong yard, on one side of which were offices for the transaction of business; on the opposite, an immense many-windowed mill, whence proceeded the continual clank of machinery and the long groaning roar of the steam-engine, enough to deafen those who lived within the enclosure.  Opposite to the wall, along which the street ran, on one of the narrow sides of the oblong, was a handsome stone-coped house,—­blackened, to be sure, by the smoke, but with paint, windows, and steps kept scrupulously clean.  It was evidently a house which had been built some fifty or sixty years.  The stone facings—­the long, narrow windows, and the number of them—­the flights of steps up to the front door, ascending from either side, and guarded by railing—­all witnessed to its age.  Margaret only wondered why people who could afford to live in so good a house, and keep it in such perfect order, did not prefer a much smaller dwelling in the country, or even some suburb; not in the continual whirl and din of the factory.  Her unaccustomed ears could hardly catch her father’s voice, as they stood on the steps awaiting the opening of the door.  The yard, too, with the great doors in the dead wall as a boundary, was but a dismal look-out for the sitting-rooms of the house—­as Margaret found when they had mounted the old-fashioned stairs, and been ushered into the drawing-room, the three windows of which went over the front door and the room on the right-hand side of the entrance.  There was no one in the drawing-room.  It seemed as though no one had been in it since the day when the furniture was bagged up with as much care as if the house was to be overwhelmed with lava, and discovered a thousand years hence.  The walls were pink and gold; the pattern on the carpet represented bunches of flowers on a light ground, but it was carefully covered up in the centre by a linen drugget, glazed and colourless.  The window-curtains were lace; each chair and sofa had its own particular veil of netting, or knitting.  Great alabaster groups occupied every flat surface, safe from dust under their glass shades.  In the middle of the room, right under the bagged-up chandelier, was a large circular table, with smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals round the circumference of its polished surface, like gaily-coloured spokes of a wheel.  Everything reflected light, nothing absorbed it.  The whole room had a painfully spotted, spangled, speckled look about it, which impressed Margaret so unpleasantly that she was hardly conscious of the peculiar cleanliness required to keep everything so white and pure in such an atmosphere, or of the trouble that must be willingly expended to secure that effect of icy, snowy discomfort.  Wherever she looked there was evidence of care and labour, but not care and labour to procure ease, to help on habits of tranquil home employment; solely to ornament, and then to preserve ornament from dirt or destruction.