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of Pemberton Hall, “Come on in … Awful news … Mick has just told me the boys won’t be out for another week.”
    Mr. Ryan, who now appeared as Mick, was standing in the hall accompanied by his partner, the slide-rule. He muttered what Christine supposed was good-morning—keeping on Mrs. Traill a gaze at once sardonic and touched with proud exasperation. Look at her, it seemed to say, isn’t she a wan?
    Mrs. Traill said, Oh well, she supposed they would have to put up with it, and Mr. Ryan went away to drink some tea. The sunny house responded with hammering, hissing and wailing.
    “They put a pipe in all wrong. A wall will have to come down,” Mrs. Traill sighed. “Talking of tea, come on down to the kitchen and we’ll have some. James and Diana will be here presently and Clive, I think, but Antonia isn’t coming until tomorrow. This way.”
    The stairs, concealed behind a thick door covered with green baize (“We kept that, don’t you adore the colour?” said Mrs. Traill), were so dark, steep and dangerous, and so shut away from the delicate proportions and airy grace and floods of light in the rest of the house, that Christine was almost shocked, until she remembered that they led to the part where the servants used to live. Of course, anything was good enough for Mrs. Benson.
    But when, after going down a stone-floored passage, they came out into the kitchen, she forgot everything in her first sight of a Boiler.
    “Isn’t it fearsome?” said Mrs. Traill, noticing her fascinated stare. “And we’re stuck with it for ever, because Mick says they daren’t move it: it would bring both walls and the ceiling down and cost thousands.”
    The thing was eight feet high, made of some dirty bluish metal, with a thick rusty pipe coming out of the top and many smaller pipes, apparently made of copper, wreathing around it. The largest pipe vanished into a hole in the ceiling, now neatly squared off.
    “Goodness, you don’t heat the water in that?” breathed Christine.
    “Of course not!” pealed Mrs. Traill. “Mick said we must never light it; I suppose he thinks we’re all bonkers … as if anyone would dare … No, the boiler is in a little cellar round at the back, oil-fired, and it heats the house as well—”
    “I’d noticed how warm it is.”
    “—and the oil is in another little cellar. There are four of them, gardening tools and things in the one near the backdoor, and James has made the other one into his wine place. I’ll just put the kettle on, and show you.”
    Christine, awed by the spectacle of the Great Boiler, had received an impression that the rest of the kitchen was equally Victorian, for the walls were papered in a shiny green-and-brown design which absorbed light, and the massive old dresser and cupboards had been retained, newly painted white.
    But although this kitchen did not correspond with those Dream ones promoted by advertisers, she now saw that it was efficient. The cooker was of the newest design, and on the walls were many shining devices for unscrewing and grinding and opening. There was something else there: cosiness. As this had been the only redeeming feature of Forty-Five Mortimer Road, Christine had grown to rely upon it, and now, having missed it for some months, she welcomed it. But, because she was a Smith, she said nothing.
    “Cosy, isn’t it?” Mrs. Traill glanced at her. How dreary some people were. Never a word of appreciation.
    “It’s a bit dark, isn’t it?” Christine said, and indeed she thought so, not realising that much of the cosiness was due to the dimness.
    “Oh, we did that on purpose—had a dark paper, I mean. I chose it. Antonia had taken a fancy to something all over little houses. It is queer, she’s so good about clothes, and has no feeling at all about that kind of thing. Let’s go and see the cellars.”
    While they were looking round the whitewashed walls of Mr. Meredith’s wine-cellar, where the racks and bins awaited their