But there are others possessing in a painful degree this said quality of adhesiveness, to whom the smallest change is obnoxious; who like drinking out of a particular cup, and sitting in a particular chair; to whom even a variation in the position of furniture is unpleasant.  Of course, this peculiarity has its bad side, and yet it is not in itself mean or ignoble.  For is not adhesiveness, faithfulness, constancy—­call it what you will—­at the root of all citizenship, clanship, and family love?  Is it not the same feeling which, granting they remain at all, makes old friendships dearer than any new?  Nay, to go to the very sacredest and closest bond, is it not that which makes an old man see to the last in his old wife’s faded face the beauty which perhaps nobody ever saw except himself, but which he sees and delights in still, simply because it is familiar and his own.

To people who possess a large share of this rare—­shall I say fatal?—­characteristic of adhesiveness, living in lodgings is about the saddest life under the sun.  Whether some dim foreboding of this fact crossed Elizabeth’s mind as she stood at the window watching for her mistresses’ first arrival at “home,” it is impossible to say.  She could feel, though she was not accustomed to analyze her feelings.  But she looked dull and sad.  Not cross, even Ascott could not have accused her of “savageness.”

And yet she had been somewhat tried.  First, in going out what she termed “marketing,” she had traversed a waste of streets, got lost several times, and returned with light weight in her butter, and sand in her moist sugar; also with the conviction that London tradesmen were the greatest rogues alive.  Secondly, a pottle of strawberries, which she had bought with her own money to grace the tea-table with the only fruit Miss Leaf cared for, had turned out a large delusion, big and beautiful at top, and all below small, crushed, and stale.  She had thrown it indignantly, pottle and all, into the kitchen fire.

Thirdly, she had a war with the landlady, partly on the subject of their fire—­which, with her Stowbury notions on the subject of coals, seemed wretchedly mean and small—­and partly on the question of table cloths at tea, which Mrs. Jones had “never heard of,” especially when the use of plate and lines was included in the rent.  And the dinginess of the article produced at last out of an omnium-gatherum sort of kitchen cupboard, made an ominous impression upon the country girl, accustomed to clean, tidy, country ways—­where the kitchen was kept as neat as the parlor, and the bedrooms were not a whit behind the sitting rooms in comfort and orderliness.  Here it seemed as if, supposing people could show a few respectable living rooms, they were content to sleep any where, and cook any how, out of anything, in the midst of any quantity of confusion and dirt.  Elizabeth set all this down as “London,” and hated it accordingly.