Her heart was heavy as lead, and she
felt a dull sense of injury as well. This hut her home!--to which she
had so freely invited sister and friend! She would be ashamed for them
ever to set eyes on it. Not in her worst dreams had she imagined it as
mean and poor as this. But perhaps . . . . With the lamp in her hand,
she tip-toed guiltily to a door in the wall: it opened into a tiny
bedroom with a sloping roof. No, this was all, all there was of it: just
these two miserable little poky rooms! She raised her head and looked
round, and the tears welled up in spite of herself. The roof was so low
that you could almost touch it; the window was no larger than a
pocket-handkerchief; there were chinks between the slabs of the walls. And
from one of these she now saw a spider crawl out, a huge black tarantula,
with horrible hairy legs. Polly was afraid of spiders; and at this the
tears began to overflow and to trickle down her cheeks. Holding her
skirts to her--the new dress she had made with such pride, now damp,
and crushed, and soiled--she sat down and put her feet, in their
soaked, mud-caked, little prunella boots, on the rung of her chair, for
fear of other monsters that might be crawling the floor.
And then, while she sat thus hunched together, the voices outside were
suddenly drowned in a deafening noise--in a hideous, stupefying din,
that nearly split one's eardrums: it sounded as though all the tins and
cans in the town were being beaten and banged before the door.
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