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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Hugh Walpole's "The Old Ladies" is a captivating exploration of the intricacies of aging, memory, and the complex fabric of human relationships. Set in a quaint English village, the narrative unfolds through the eyes of two elderly sisters, amplifying Walpole's keen observations of social dynamics and the subtleties of character interactions. The novel's style is imbued with a sense of warmth and humor, underpinned by a poignant realism that resonates with introspective reflections on the passage of time. Walpole's adept use of dialogue captures the nuances of shared histories and unspoken grievances, creating a richly textured literary experience. Hugh Walpole, a prominent figure in early 20th-century literature, was known for his deep psychological insights and strong character development. His personal experiences, including his upbringing in an artistic family and his exposure to the dramatic shifts of the post-war era, inform the themes prevalent in "The Old Ladies." His understanding of the elderly experience stems from a genuine empathy and curiosity, exploring the internal landscapes of his characters with finesse. This novel is highly recommended for readers who appreciate character-driven narratives that delve into the nuances of human existence. Walpole's sharp wit and emotional depth invite readers to contemplate the complexities of life and the richness of intergenerational bonds, making "The Old Ladies" an enduring and thought-provoking read. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Old Ladies
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The Old Ladies, Hugh Walpole lays bare how the gentlest surfaces of ordinary life can mask a fierce, unspoken struggle for safety, companionship, and moral authority, revealing a world where kindness and cruelty trade places in the hush of parlors, the routines of tea tables, and the fragile equilibrium of aging, and where the smallest gesture—an invitation, a confidence, a withheld smile—can tip the balance from comfort to dread, binding everyday civility to a deep current of fear that asks what we owe one another when time, independence, and dignity are slipping away.
This is a work of psychological fiction with a subtle undertow of suspense, built within the narrow corridors of domestic life rather than the open spaces of adventure. First published during the interwar years—mid-1920s—its atmosphere reflects a period sensitized to vulnerability and social change. Walpole, an English novelist, crafts the book as a close-quarters study, using a confined setting to heighten tension and moral scrutiny. The result is not a sensation tale but a measured, unsettling narrative that draws its power from interior conflict, social nuance, and the slow pressure of habit turning into fate.
The premise is spare and concentrated: a few elderly women, accustomed to careful routines and small securities, find their settled world troubled by shifting loyalties, competing needs, and a presence that nudges ordinary anxieties into sharper forms. Walpole builds the story through incremental turns rather than revelations, inviting readers to notice tone, posture, and implication. The narrative voice is calm and observant, often tender but never sentimental, while the mood moves from mild unease to a layered claustrophobia. Readers encounter a slow-burn experience, attentive to human frailty, social masks, and the quiet ways power asserts itself in intimate spaces.
At its core, the novel explores aging as both a physical condition and a social predicament. It considers dependence and dignity, how money and perceived respectability shape the choices available to those who feel their world narrowing, and how fear can distort judgment as surely as malice. Loneliness, memory, and the longing for recognition become catalysts, and the uncertainties of identity—how others see us versus how we see ourselves—press relentlessly on the characters. Walpole’s intent is not to condemn but to observe, tracing how self-protection can resemble cruelty, and how moral clarity blurs when survival and conscience pull in opposite directions.
Formally, the book favors close observation over spectacle. Walpole’s prose is measured and exact, attentive to furnishings, rituals, and the choreography of conversation—the small details through which status and desire are negotiated. The setting’s narrowness is an instrument of pressure: rooms feel tighter, schedules more brittle, and ordinary objects acquire an aura of meaning as tensions accumulate. Point of view is handled with tact, rewarding readers who listen for what is not said. The pacing is deliberate, allowing unease to gather credibly, so that when the story hardens, it does so with the inevitability of character rather than the mechanics of plot.
For contemporary readers, the novel resonates as a study of vulnerability and the ethics of care. It asks how communities attend to those on society’s quieter margins, and how politeness can conceal neglect or manipulation. Questions about independence, trust, and the pressures exerted by limited resources remain urgent, as do reflections on rumor, reputation, and the fragile bonds that hold small groups together. The Old Ladies prompts consideration of what compassion requires when convenience and conscience diverge, and how fear—of poverty, of illness, of exclusion—can reshape relationships in ways that feel intimate, recognizably human, and unsettlingly current.
Approached as a compact work of psychological suspense, this novel offers the satisfactions of attentive reading: layered characterization, finely shaded moods, and a gradual deepening of unease rather than shocks. It rewards patience with an atmosphere that lingers, asking readers to revisit gestures and silences after the final page. Without resorting to melodrama, Walpole creates a moral pressure cooker in which choices acquire the weight of fate. The experience is both compassionate and disturbing, inviting reflection on how easily ordinary life can tilt toward harm, and how the pursuit of security—so understandable, so human—can darken the very shelter it seeks to build.
Synopsis
Hugh Walpole’s The Old Ladies is set in a small English cathedral city, where tradition and reputation shape daily life. The story centers on a quiet lodging house on a respectable street, a place of thin walls, shared meals, and careful courtesies. The tenants are elderly women whose routines and memories become as important as their surroundings. The narrative opens with precise attention to the town’s rhythms—church bells, tea hours, and shopkeepers’ nods—establishing an atmosphere of watchfulness. Within this contained world, small gestures carry weight, and the smallest alteration in habit or company can draw interest, sympathy, or alarm from neighbors and acquaintances.
Miss Beringer, a gentle, anxious woman, is introduced as seeking safety and companionship in the house. Her life is modest, restricted to familiar streets and treasured mementos from a more active past. She longs for peace but is also vulnerable to pressure, prizing the stability that the house promises. The narrative highlights her careful thrift, her reverence for proprieties, and her tendency to second-guess herself. Early episodes show her adjusting to the cadences of communal living: polite dining-room conversations, shared fires in chill weather, and tactful exchanges that conceal deeper feelings. Her need for approval quietly shapes her choices and relationships.
A fellow resident, Miss Payne, emerges as a commanding presence, projecting certainty and moral rigor. She positions herself as a protector of standards, offering counsel that often feels like instruction. As the two women share rooms, routines, and confidences, a pattern forms: Miss Beringer’s gratitude and dependence meet Miss Payne’s desire to guide and correct. The book traces their intimacy through small incidents—shopping trips, social calls, and evening talks—where homage to duty blends with unspoken apprehension. Walpole maps the thresholds between kindness and control, showing how correction can harden into dominance, and how compliance can become its own habit.
The balance of the house shifts with the arrival of another elderly woman, a lively, enigmatic newcomer whose past appears colorful and uncertain. Her conversation sparkles, her stories suggest travel and reversals, and her resources seem both limited and mysterious. She befriends Miss Beringer with warmth that feels like relief after rigors, while arousing Miss Payne’s suspicion. Rumors gather in the town’s drawing rooms: hints of unpaid bills, old acquaintances who speak too freely, and episodes better forgotten. The newcomer’s presence complicates loyalties, opening a space between caution and hope. The lodging house, once quiet, becomes a stage for competing influences and contrasting tempers.
Domestic life and public scrutiny intertwine. Teas, church services, and charity meetings become occasions where reputations are tested and quietly made. Walpole tracks an escalation of small frictions—mislaid items, awkward introductions, and remarks that land slightly too hard. Miss Beringer, eager to please, tries to maintain balance between a reassuring rule of conduct and the appeal of novel companionship. The city’s gossip circulates steadily, never quite provable yet never easily ignored. Social skirmishes are fought in tone and timing rather than declarations. The sense of an enclosure intensifies: the house’s stairs, shared parlors, and dim corridors focus attention on every footstep and half-heard word.
As the triangle settles into place, pressure mounts. The newcomer’s attentions promise affection and adventure in miniature—walks in new lanes, daring choices at the shops, sympathetic listening—while Miss Payne doubles down on her standards and warnings. Money, favors, and small confidences turn into leverage. Walpole presents a precise study of habit and conscience: Miss Beringer’s desire for calm conflicts with a flicker of independence. Public scenes grow sharper, including an uncomfortable tea that crystallizes tensions, and a church encounter that spreads whispers. Each woman believes she is acting for the best, while their motives, ideals, and private vulnerabilities begin to work against one another.
Midway through, external circumstances tighten the plot. Illness threatens the delicate order, correspondence arrives with troubling implications, and the changing season lends the house a chill that deepens its claustrophobia. Decisions about money, accommodation, and future plans acquire urgency. A proposal for change—whether relocation, formal separation, or a new arrangement—forces the characters to assess the cost of their alliances. The motif of thresholds recurs: doors opening or closing, stairs negotiated with care, rooms chosen for privacy or display. The narrative emphasizes slow accumulation rather than sudden revelation, letting constrained spaces and careful rituals heighten the sense of imminent crisis.
A decisive evening gathers the story’s elements into confrontation. Tempers, anxieties, and competing narratives surface plainly at last. Words sharpen, loyalties are tested, and gestures take on a fateful energy. The house itself becomes an actor—its shadows, distances, and angles framing misunderstandings. What follows pivots on fear and resolve, with consequences shaped less by grand intention than by long-established habits of deference or command. Walpole withholds sensationalism, making the turn of events feel both inevitable and edged with uncertainty. The climax exposes the true measure of each woman’s character, while preserving the novel’s focus on motive, perception, and the pressures of a watching world.
In the aftermath, the book gathers its themes without grand pronouncement. The Old Ladies presents a study of age, dependency, and the mask of respectability, showing how care can slide into coercion and how longing for security can complicate judgment. It suggests that the social net that promises safety also tightens around its members, fixing their roles even as it shelters them. The resolution reorders the house and the city’s talk, acknowledging loss while hinting at endurance. Walpole’s narrative underscores that small choices—made at tea-tables, shop counters, and stair landings—shape destinies as surely as dramatic acts, leaving a sober, resonant conclusion.
Historical Context
Hugh Walpole’s The Old Ladies is set in the early 1920s in a provincial English cathedral city, widely recognized as his fictional Polchester, modeled on Truro in Cornwall. The locale is defined by narrow streets, Georgian houses sliding into decay, and the imposing moral and architectural presence of the cathedral. Within this circumscribed urban world, genteel boarding arrangements and rented rooms shape daily life for solitary, aging women of limited means. The time frame—immediately after the First World War—brings a climate of mourning, restraint, and anxious respectability. The setting’s enclosed spaces and close-knit gossip networks mirror interwar provincial England’s tensions between tradition and unsettling social change.
The First World War (1914–1918) devastated Britain, with approximately 887,000 military dead and millions more wounded, and disrupted employment, housing, and family structures. Demobilization from 1919 strained local economies; the 1921 census recorded a “surplus women” problem, with about 1.7 million more women than men in England and Wales. Many middle-class spinsters and widows, deprived of expected marriages or male support, relied on small annuities and modest pensions, often entering boarding houses. This demographic reality undergirds The Old Ladies: its vulnerable protagonists inhabit precisely the social niche produced by wartime losses and postwar austerity, their insecurity reflecting the era’s bereavement-laden, precarious domestic arrangements.
Women’s political and professional status changed rapidly in these years. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised women over 30 who met property qualifications, and the Equal Franchise Act 1928 later extended the vote to women over 21 on the same terms as men. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 opened many professions to women. Yet these formal gains coexisted with economic dependence and social scrutiny. The novel mirrors this contradiction: elderly gentlewomen possess moral authority and civic visibility in a cathedral town but remain financially exposed, their autonomy mediated by landlords, charities, and relatives, capturing the tension between legal progress and lived vulnerability.
Housing and income policies after the war were central to everyday security. The Rent and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act 1915 imposed rent controls, while the Housing and Town Planning, etc. Act 1919 (the Addison Act) aimed at large-scale council-house construction; rising costs curtailed ambitions by 1921–1922. Old-age support slowly expanded from the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act, and the Widows’, Orphans’ and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act 1925 further reformed provision. Simultaneously, the 1920–1921 slump and the decline of domestic service squeezed genteel households. The Old Ladies reflects this material landscape: shabby respectability, fear of eviction, and dependence on small fixed incomes drive the dynamics of power and intimidation inside lodging-house rooms.
Public health crises shaped postwar sensibilities. The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million globally, with roughly 228,000 deaths in the United Kingdom, amplifying anxieties about frailty, isolation, and the reliability of local care. Poor Law institutions still loomed, even as policy began to shift; the Local Government Act 1929 would soon abolish Boards of Guardians and transfer relief to councils. Though set earlier, the novel’s atmosphere draws on this world of parochial charity and limited safety nets: the old women’s dread of illness, destitution, and institutional dependence is a realistic response to an era when sickness or scandal could precipitate social ruin.
Industrial conflict intensified in the early 1920s, culminating in the General Strike of 4–12 May 1926, when roughly 1.7–1.8 million workers ceased work in support of miners resisting wage cuts after the Samuel Commission. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government confronted the Trade Union Congress; Winston Churchill edited the British Gazette to rally opinion. Though The Old Ladies predates the strike, it registers the mounting class unease: service trades, small proprietors, and salaried gentlefolk interact in brittle, suspicious ways. The novel’s tight-knit neighborhood theatres a society primed for rumor and moral judgment—habits that flourish when economic strain erodes trust across class lines.
Interwar fears about domestic crime and the vulnerability of women were stoked by sensational press coverage, such as the Crumbles murders in Sussex (1920 and 1924) and other widely reported cases. Simultaneously, policing modernized gradually and women’s patrols emerged in several forces, yet anxieties lingered about safety in private lodgings. Walpole’s own wartime experience intensified his sensitivity to menace: he served with relief and propaganda duties in Russia from 1915 to 1917, witnessing upheavals around Petrograd. Exposure to wartime dread and revolutionary instability informed his interwar fiction’s claustrophobic moral climates, which The Old Ladies translates into the quotidian terror of a respectable house.
The book critiques the period’s polite indifference to structural precarity. By dramatizing elderly women’s dependence on minuscule incomes, unstable tenancies, and fragile reputations, it exposes the gap between civic piety and practical protection in cathedral-town England. The novel indicts the insufficiency of pensions, the patchwork of charity, and the power imbalances in private renting that leave women prey to coercion and psychological abuse. It also rebukes class pretensions that mask cruelty, showing how communal gossip can regulate behavior more harshly than law. In doing so, The Old Ladies offers a stringent social diagnosis of interwar Britain’s aging, female poor and near-poor.
The Old Ladies
CHAPTER IMRS. AMOREST PAYS A VISIT
Quite a number of years ago there was an old rickety building on the rock above Seatown in Polchester, and it was one of a number in an old grass-grown square known as Pontippy Square.
In this house at one time or another lived three old ladies, Mrs. Amorest, Miss May Beringer, and Mrs. Agatha Payne. They were really old ladies, because at the time of these events Mrs. Amorest was seventy-one, Miss Beringer seventy-three, and Mrs. Payne seventy. Mrs. Amorest and Mrs. Payne were wonderfully strong women for their age, but Miss Beringer felt her back a good deal.
It was a windy, creaky, rain-bitten dwelling-place for three old ladies. Mrs. Payne lived in it always; although she had fine health her legs were weak and would suddenly desert her. What she hated above anything else in life was that she should be ludicrous to people, and the thought that one day she might tumble down in Polchester High Street, there in front of everybody, determined her seclusion. She was a proud and severe woman was Mrs. Payne.
Mrs. Amorest and Mrs. Payne had lived in these rooms for some time. Miss Beringer was quite a newcomer—so new a comer in fact that the other two ladies had not as yet seen her. The lodgers on that top floor of the house had the same charwoman, Mrs. Bloxam, and she came in at eight in the morning, cooked the three breakfasts, stayed until ten and tidied the rooms. After ten o’clock the three old ladies were alone on their floor of the house, very nearly alone indeed in the whole building, because the second floor had been a store for furniture but was now deserted, and the ground floor was the offices of a strange religious sect known as the “Fortified Christians.” The only “Fortified Christian” ever seen was a pale dirty young man with a blue chin who sometimes unlocked a grimy door, sat down at a grimier table, and wrote letters. Mrs. Amorest had once met him in the ground-floor passage, and it had been like meeting a ghost.
Mrs. Amorest herself stayed indoors a good deal, because three pair of stairs were a great number for an old lady, however strong she might be.
She looked an old lady of course with her snow-white hair, her charming wrinkled face, and her neat compact little body. She had also eyes as bright as the sea with the sun on it, and a smile both radiant and confiding. But she was like many other English old ladies, I suppose. I suppose so, because she never attracted the least attention in Polchester when she walked about. Nobody said, “Why, there goes a charming old lady!”
She had never known a day’s illness in her life. When she had borne her son, Brand, she had been up and about within a week of his birth. And yet she had none of that aggressive good health that is so customary with physically triumphant people. She never thought about it as indeed she very seldom thought about herself at all.
Another thing that one must tell about Mrs. Amorest is that she was very poor. Very poor indeed, and of course she would not have lived in that draughty uncomfortable room at the top of the old house had it not been so.
She liked comfort and pretty things, and she had been well acquainted with both when her husband had been alive. Her husband, Ambrose Amorest, had been a poet, a poet-dramatist (“Tintagel,” A Drama in Five Acts, Elden Foster, 1880; and “The Slandered Queen,” A Drama in Five Acts, Elden Foster, 1883, were his two best-known plays). For a while things had gone well with them. Amorest had inherited from his father. Then quite suddenly he had died from double pneumonia[1], and it had been found that he had left nothing at all behind him save manuscripts and debts. A common affair. Every novel dealing with poets tells the same story. Brand, the only child, had at the age of eighteen gone off to seek his fortune in America. For a while things had gone well with him, then silence. It was now three years since Mrs. Amorest had heard from him.
Indeed, the old lady was now very thoroughly alone in the world. Her only relation living was her cousin Francis Bulling, who also lived in Polchester. It was because of him, in the first place, that she had come to Polchester; she thought that it would be like home to be near a relation, the only one she had. But it had not been very much like home. Mrs. Bulling had not liked her; and even after Mrs. Bulling’s death, when Cousin Francis[3] had been a grim old man, sixty-eight years of age, tortured with gout[2] and all alone in his grim old house, he had not wanted to see her.
He was rich, but he had never given her a penny; and then, one day, when she came to see him (she never thought of the money but felt it her duty occasionally to do so), he had laughed and asked her what she would do with twenty thousand pounds a year.
She had said that she did not know what she would do, and he had said that he might as well leave it to her as to any one else. She had tried not to think of this, but money was the one power that forced her sometimes to think of herself. She had so very little, and it was dwindling and dwindling because, kind Mr. Agnew her solicitor explained to her, her investments weren’t paying as well as they did. She knew very little about investments. Her view of money in general was that one must never get into debt. She paid for everything as she got it, and if she couldn’t afford something there and then, she didn’t get it. From quarter to quarter the sum had to stretch itself out, and kind Mr. Neilson at the Bank wanted it to stretch, she was sure, as far as it could, but, powerful man though he was, he couldn’t work miracles.
Although she thought every one kind and most people nice she was not a fool. She was not blind to people’s faults, but she selected their virtues instead. She felt that she was an old woman with nothing interesting, amusing, or unusual about her, and therefore did feel it very obliging of any one to take an interest in her. It could not truthfully be said that many people did. She had her pride, and she did not like her friends to see her poverty, and so she did not ask them to her room. On the other hand, she did not wish to accept hospitality without returning it.
Then, even though you are very strong, if you are over seventy and a woman, you have only a limited store of energy. Mrs. Amorest was often weary, and sometimes felt that she could not face those stairs!
In her dreams at night the stairs figured, long-toothed, dragon-scaled, fiery to the foot—her demons!
But when she had reached her room, then all was well. In these years she had grown fond of that room. Once, when investments had behaved more nobly and she could ask her friends to visit her, it had been a very gay room indeed. She had always liked pretty things, and had inherited from her earlier, more prosperous married life certain fine pieces of furniture. In the right-hand corner of the room was her bed, and in front of the bed a screen of old rose-coloured silk. There were three old chairs also fashioned in rose colour, a rug of a rich red-brown, a little gate-legged table, and on her wash-hand stand her jug and basin were of glass, and the little water jug had around it a wreath of briar-rose. She had, too, a bookcase with twelve volumes of Macmillan’s Magazine, some stories by Grace Aguilar and Mrs. Craik, and Tennyson’s complete works in eight volumes; also the four books published by her husband, one of poems and three of plays.
Her chiefest treasures were on her mantelpiece, a faded photograph of Brand aged twelve in football clothes—“such a sturdy little chap” was the phrase she had used in the old days when there had been visitors—and a drawing of her husband, a thin figure with hair flowing, a cape flung over his right shoulder and a book held prominently in the hand. “A rather weak face” that same visitor might have thought, but to Mrs. Amorest, rich in intimate memories, perfection; perfect in physical beauty, in spiritual significance, in human sympathy.
The room was a large one, and might seem to the superficial observer chill and spare. The chest of drawers and the cupboard where Mrs. Amorest kept her clothes could not cover sufficiently the farther wall space. The windows were not large. Mrs. Payne had the view right over the Pol and the country beyond. Mrs. Amorest had chimney-pots and not a glimpse of the Cathedral. Miss Beringer had the Cathedral, but her room was a pound a year more than Mrs. Amorest’s.
Mrs. Amorest would not have a fire until the winter had really quite closed in, and the difficult days were such as these in November when it could be so cold and so wet and so wild and yet it was not truly winter. To-day was not a bad day; a pale ghostly light was over the world, the sky was scattered with tatters of white cloud as though for a celestial paper-chase, and the smoke from all the chimneys blew wildly in the wind.
Mrs. Amorest noticed these things as she prepared to go out. The Cathedral had struck (very faintly heard from here) two o’clock, the sun suddenly made a struggle and threw a faint primrose glow upon the remains of Mrs. Amorest’s little luncheon—a coffee cup, a tumbler, a plate with crumbled biscuit, and a half-empty sardine tin. Three water biscuits, one sardine, and a cup of coffee, and Mrs. Amorest felt fortified for the rather difficult visit to her Cousin Francis that she was about to pay.
As she arranged her bonnet over her beautiful white hair in front of the misted looking-glass she was suddenly aware that she was going to like this visit to her cousin less than any that she had ever paid him. She would like it less for two reasons; one that he was very ill, and that she would therefore be in the hands of his housekeeper, Miss Greenacre, who both disliked and despised her; the other that kind Mr. Neilson had written to her to tell her that there were only Ten Pounds Four Shillings and Fivepence to her credit in the bank, and Quarter Day was yet far distant, and that therefore the thought of Cousin Francis’s money was more dominant in her brain than it had ever been before.
She didn’t wish it to be so. As she stood there, twisting the purple strings of her bonnet in her thin beautiful fingers, she thought how wicked she must be to have this in her mind!
But as you grew older you seemed to have less and less power to keep things out of your mind. You were being punished perhaps for looseness of thought in your earlier days. You had been too happy and careless then and must pay now. It was the one remnant of Mrs. Amorest’s strict puritan upbringing that she felt that God did not intend His servants to be too consciously happy. And yet with her, all her life, happiness would keep breaking in. Probably she must pay for that now.
She gave a little sigh as she turned away from the window. She was still wickedly hungry. That was the punishment for being physically so blooming, that you had always so healthy an appetite. She looked for a moment covetously at the sardine tin. One more sardine, one more biscuit? Then resolutely shook her head, and as was her way often when she was alone her face broke into smiles. How ridiculous to have such an appetite with her small body! Now if she had been Mrs. Payne ... !
And perhaps if she were in a kindly mood Miss Greenacre would offer her some tea with some of those nice sponge fingers that Cousin Francis had. She was not really greedy, but she liked sponge fingers.
Before she went out she listened for a moment, her head cocked on one side like an enquiring bird. How silent the house was! Like a dead-house. The wind was playing through it like a musician plucking a note from a board there, a stair here, an ill-fitting window somewhere else. But the house itself gave no sound.
Mrs. Payne too—how silent she was! There in her room day after day, thinking, thinking—of what? Of her past, one must suppose. After seventy the past was of so much more importance than the present. And the new tenant, Miss Beringer, how quiet she was! She had been there for three days now and Mrs. Amorest had not yet seen her. “A nice-spoken lady,” Mrs. Bloxam had said, “and fond of talking.” Tall and thin and dressed in pale green, a strange costume for one of her years. And having decided this with a thought of cheerful approbation for her own grey silk, Mrs. Amorest started down the stairs.
