morrow.

No. 1, Hound Street, abutting on the garden of a house of better class,
was distinctly the show building of the street. The door, however, was
not closed, and pulling the remnant of a bell, Hilary walked in.

The first thing that he noticed was a smell; it was not precisely bad,
but it might have been better. It was a smell of walls and washing,
varied rather vaguely by red herrings. The second thing he noticed was
his moonlight bulldog, who stood on the doorstep eyeing a tiny sandy
cat. This very little cat, whose back was arched with fury, he was
obliged to chase away before his bulldog would come in. The third thing
he noticed was a lame woman of short stature, standing in the doorway
of a room. Her face, with big cheek-bones, and wide-open, light grey,
dark-lashed eyes, was broad and patient; she rested her lame leg by
holding to the handle of the door.

"I dunno if you'll find anyone upstairs. I'd go and ask, but my leg's
lame."

"So I see," said Hilary; "I'm sorry."

The woman sighed: "Been like that these five years"; and turned back
into her room.

"Is there nothing to be done for it?"

"Well, I did think so once," replied the woman, "but they say the bone's
diseased; I neglected it at the start."

"Oh dear!"

"We hadn't the time to give to it," the woman said defensively, retiring
into a room so full of china cups, photographs, coloured prints, waxwork
fruits, and other ornaments, that there seemed no room for the enormous
bed.

Wishing her good-morning, Hilary began to mount the stairs. On the first
floor he paused. Here, in the back room, the little model lived.

He looked around him. The paper on the passage walls was of a dingy
orange colour, the blind of the window torn, and still pursuing him,
pervading everything, was the scent of walls and washing and red
herrings. There came on him a sickness, a sort of spiritual revolt. To
live here, to pass up these stairs, between these dingy, bilious walls,
on this dirty carpet, with this--ugh! every day; twice, four times, six
times, who knew how many times a day! And that sense, the first to be
attracted or revolted, the first to become fastidious with the culture
of the body, the last to be expelled from the temple of the pure-spirit;
that sense to whose refinement all breeding and all education is
devoted; that sense which, ever an inch at least in front of man, is
able to retard the development of nations, and paralyse all social
scheme