It’s a miserable thing not to have a watch, thought Maggie. It was certainly day, but the rain still fell, a steady drizzle now from the grey sky; it might be early morning, and it might be late. Back in New York you could tell by the sounds from the street; here there were no sounds, not even the lapping of the water any more.
She put on her clean blue cotton dress to go to the bathroom; she took it off to wash and put it on again. She was not going to meet those men in any dressing-gown. Then when she was all neat and trim, she went down the narrow stairs, quietly but not timidly. She felt that she had been deceived and shabbily treated; ‘put upon,’ she called it in her mother’s phrase, and that warmed her heart with a good, steady anger.
The nasty dirty house was chillier and mustier
