Stephen never affected
her like this.
Having little or no notion where to go, they walked in the direction of
Bayswater. To place the Park between Hound Street and the little model
was the first essential. On arriving at the other side of the Broad
Walk, they made instinctively away from every sight of green. In a long,
grey street of dismally respectable appearance they found what they were
looking for, a bed-sitting room furnished, advertised on a card in the
window. The door was opened by the landlady, a tall woman of narrow
build, with a West-Country accent, and a rather hungry sweetness running
through her hardness. They stood talking with her in a passage, whose
oilcloth of variegated pattern emitted a faint odour. The staircase
could be seen climbing steeply up past walls covered with a shining
paper cut by narrow red lines into small yellow squares. An almanack,
of so floral a design that nobody would surely want to steal it, hung
on the wall; below it was an umbrella stand without umbrellas. The dim
little passage led past two grimly closed doors painted rusty red to two
half-open doors with dull glass in their panels. Outside, in the street
from which they had mounted by stone steps, a shower of sleet had begun
to fall. Hilary shut the door, but the cold spirit of that shower had
already slipped into the bleak, narrow house.
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