“I think I’d sooner have the other one,” said Mr. Povey, “because it’s on the right side, you see.”  And he touched his right cheek.

Having taken Mrs. Baines’s chair, he bent his face down to the fire, seeking comfort from its warmth.  Sophia poked the fire, whereupon Mr. Povey abruptly withdrew his face.  He then felt something light on his shoulders.  Constance had taken the antimacassar from the back of the chair, and protected him with it from the draughts.  He did not instantly rebel, and therefore was permanently barred from rebellion.  He was entrapped by the antimacassar.  It formally constituted him an invalid, and Constance and Sophia his nurses.  Constance drew the curtain across the street door.  No draught could come from the window, for the window was not ‘made to open.’  The age of ventilation had not arrived.  Sophia shut the other two doors.  And, each near a door, the girls gazed at Mr. Povey behind his back, irresolute, but filled with a delicious sense of responsibility.

The situation was on a different plane now.  The seriousness of Mr. Povey’s toothache, which became more and more manifest, had already wiped out the ludicrous memory of the encounter in the showroom.  Looking at these two big girls, with their short-sleeved black frocks and black aprons, and their smooth hair, and their composed serious faces, one would have judged them incapable of the least lapse from an archangelic primness; Sophia especially presented a marvellous imitation of saintly innocence.  As for the toothache, its action on Mr. Povey was apparently periodic; it gathered to a crisis like a wave, gradually, the torture increasing till the wave broke and left Mr. Povey exhausted, but free for a moment from pain.  These crises recurred about once a minute.  And now, accustomed to the presence of the young virgins, and having tacitly acknowledged by his acceptance of the antimacassar that his state was abnormal, he gave himself up frankly to affliction.  He concealed nothing of his agony, which was fully displayed by sudden contortions of his frame, and frantic oscillations of the rocking-chair.  Presently, as he lay back enfeebled in the wash of a spent wave, he murmured with a sick man’s voice: 

“I suppose you haven’t got any laudanum?”

The girls started into life.  “Laudanum, Mr. Povey?”

“Yes, to hold in my mouth.”

He sat up, tense; another wave was forming.  The excellent fellow was lost to all self-respect, all decency.

“There’s sure to be some in mother’s cupboard,” said Sophia.

Constance, who bore Mrs. Baines’s bunch of keys at her girdle, a solemn trust, moved a little fearfully to a corner cupboard which was hung in the angle to the right of the projecting fireplace, over a shelf on which stood a large copper tea-urn.  That corner cupboard, of oak inlaid with maple and ebony in a simple border pattern, was typical of the room.  It was of a piece with the deep green “flock”