om beyond. The
kitchen was littered with all John Upham's poor household goods,
prostrate and unwashed, degraded even from their one dignity of use.
One of the kitchen windows opened towards the sand-hill; the room was
full of its garish glare of reflected sunlight, and the revelations
were pitiless. Laura Upham, once a model housekeeper, had lost all
ambition and domestic pride, now she had such a poor house to keep
and so many children to tend.

Upham muttered an apology as Jerome picked his way across the room.

"Laury has been up all night with the baby, an' she hasn't had any
time to redd up the room," he said. "The children have been in here
all the mornin', too, an' they've stirred things up some. I've just
sent 'em out to pick flowers to keep 'em quiet."

As he spoke he gathered up awkwardly, with a curious over-motion of
his broad shoulders, as if he would conceal the action, various
articles in his path. When he opened the door into the bedroom he
crammed them behind it with a quick, shifty motion.

The kitchen had been repulsive, but the bedroom fairly shocked with
the very indelicacy of untidiness. Jerome felt an actual modesty
about entering this room, in which so many disclosures of the closest
secrets of the flesh were made. The very dust and discolorations of
the poor furnishings, the confined air, made one turn one's face
aside as from too coarse a betrayal of personal reserve. The naked
indecency of domestic life seemed to display and vaunt itself,
sparing none of its homely and ungraceful details, to the young man
on the threshold of the room.

"Laury 'ain't had a chance to redd up this, either," poor John Upham
whispered in his ear, and gathered up with a furtive swoop some linen
from the floor.

"Oh, that's all right!" Jerome whispered back, and entered boldly,
shutting as it were all the wretched disclosures of the room out of
his consciousness, and all effort to do was needless when he saw Mrs.
Upham's face.

Laura Upham's great hollow eyes, filled with an utter passiveness of
despair, stared up at him out of a sallow gloom of face. She had been
pretty once, and she was not an old woman now, but her beauty was all
gone. Her slender shoulders rounded themselves over the little
creature swathed in soiled flannel on her lap. Just then it was
quiet; but it began wailing again, distorting all its miserable
little face into a wide mouth of feeble clamor as Jerome drew near.

Mrs. Upham looked