In those days she was like a little Puritan girl, with her plain frocks and prim gait. Her black hair, confined by a semicircular comb which stretched from ear to ear over the top of her head, was brushed straight away from her forehead, and fell across the entire width of her shoulders in glossy, wavy lines. Her grey eyes were rather large, except when she laughed, and they surveyed people with a frank, inquiring look which frightened some of the commercial travellers who came into the shop and gave her threepenny bits; it seemed as if all one's secret shames stood revealed to that artless gaze. Her nose was short and flattened, but her mouth happened to be perfect, of exactly the classic form and size, with delectable lips half hiding the small white teeth.
To her the house appeared to be of immense proportions; she had been told that once, before she was born, it was three houses. Certainly it possessed more than the usual number of staircases, and one of these, with the single room to which it gave access, was always closed. From the Square, the window of the disused chamber, obscured and bare, contrasted strangely with the clear panes, white blinds, and red pads of the others. This room was next to her own, the two staircases running parallel; and the thought of its dread emptiness awed her at nights. One Saturday night in bed she discovered that grandma, who had been plaiting her hair for Sunday, had left a comb sticking in it. She called aloud to grandma, to Uncle Mark, to Uncle Luke, in vain. None of them came to her; but she distinctly heard an answering cry from the shut room. She ceased to call, and lay fearfully quiet for a while; then it was morning, and the comb had slipped out of her hair and down into the bed.
Beneath the house were many cellars. One served for kitchen, and Adeline had a swing there, hung from a beam; two others were larders; a fourth held coal, and in a fifth ashes were thrown. There were yet two more under the shop, to be reached by a separate flight of stone steps. Uncle Mark went down those steps every afternoon to turn on the gas, but he would never allow Adeline to go with him. Grandma, indeed, was very cross if, when the door leading to the steps happened to be open, Adeline approached within a yard of it. Often, chattering to the shop-girls, who at quiet times of the day clustered round the stove with their sewing, she would suddenly think of the cellars below, and her heart would seem to stop.
