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Updated: June 19, 2025
Although it was in the month of May that I made this visit, I shivered with cold as I entered this old house, and my gorge rose in disgust at the unaired smell and ignoble scenes which everywhere appeared. The clerk I applied to had the very face one might expect to find in such a place: one of those colorless, hard, sinister faces which are to be seen in nearly all the scenes of Paris reality.
At her mother's door she dismissed Chadwick for an hour or two of warmth and shelter, and, sighing, went into the unaired dark hallway that smelled to-day of wet woollens and of a smoky kerosene wick, and retained as well its old faint odour of carbolic acid. Julia found the family as usual in the kitchen, and the kitchen as usual dirty and close.
It may come from a corridor into which other wards are ventilated, from a hall, always unaired, always full of the fumes of gas, dinner, of various kinds of mustiness; from an underground kitchen, sink, washhouse, water-closet, or even, as I myself have had sorrowful experience, from open sewers loaded with filth; and with this the patient's room or ward is aired, as it is called poisoned, it should rather be said.
If through carelessness or accident an article is scorched, lay it in the hottest sunshine to be found. If the fiber is not burned, this will often take the spot entirely out. Let the ironed clothes hang in the air for at least twenty-four hours after ironing. Unaired sheets have often brought on fatal sickness. Examine all clothes sent up from the wash.
They live their lives in small, unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness.
Within that room of chromos and the cold horsehair smell of unaired years, silence, except for the singing of three gas-jets, had momentarily fallen, a dozen or so flushed faces, grotesquely sobered, staring through the gaseous fog, the fluttering lids of a magistrate whose lips habitually fluttered, just lifting from his book.
They then stayed safely at home, and infested the unaired drawing-room pale people reading pink papers, and talking "system"; or flushed people playing bridge for small points, with the windows hermetically closed and their backs to the sunset.
Then a last sweeping survey and he turned out the gas, opened the door and peered into the hall. It stretched vacant to the window at the far end, a subdued light showing its carpeted length. His nostrils caught its unaired closeness, his ears the heavy stillness of a place enshrining sleep. Night still held the streets, at this hour dim, deserted vistas, looking larger than they did by day.
Susan hardly recognized the dining-room; it was unaired, yet chilly; a tall, milk-stained glass, and some crumbs on the green cloth, showed where little Betsey had had a lonely luncheon; there were paper bags on the sideboard and a litter of newspapers on a chair. Nothing suggested the old, exquisite order. The kitchen was even more desolate, as it had been more inviting before.
This chiefly concerned me, because home cosseting had made me old woman enough to be uneasy about unaired beds; and I knew that my mother meant to consign Clarence to the mullion chamber. So, without betraying Jane, I spoke to her, and was answered, 'Oh, sir, I'll take care of that; I'll light a fire and air the mattresses well. I wish that was all, poor young gentleman!
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