Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/81

Rh the nature of the woman whose mere presence could produce such a change.

But there was no struggling against her inﬂuence; and as, the night before, he had looked at Westmore with the nurse’s eyes, so he now found himself seeing his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He noticed the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected garden of their neighbour, the week’s wash ﬂaunting itself indecently through the denuded shrubs about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his companions to the narrow passage he was assailed by the expected whiff of “boiled dinner,” with which the steam of wash—tubs was intimately mingled.

Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by his rolled- back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles he was running through his stiff black hair.

“Hallo, John,” he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at sight of Amherst’s companions; and at the same moment the frowsy maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust her head out to call after him: “See here, Mr. Duplain, don’t you leave your cravat laying round in my dough.” [ 69 ]