The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical terms of Mrs. Melville’s case and translated them into ordinary language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy.  “Pulmonary dyspnoea—­settled on her chest—­heart too weak to do a tracheotomy—­run a tube down....”  They opened the door of the room and told her to go into it.  She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see her mother, because the room was so like her mother’s life.  There was hardly anything in it at all.  There were grey distempered walls, a large window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs, and a screen of an impure green colour.  The roadside would have been a richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known neither the hazards of being a rogue’s wife, which she would have rather enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband’s innumerable but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and minimally furnished as this room.

Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it.  But hearing a sound of stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the screen.  There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron bedstead.  Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes.  Ellen went to the side of the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother’s had ever been.  All that dear face was changed.  The skin was glazed and pink, and about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth, there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the slow, roaring breath.  Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end of the bed.  She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville’s immense glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some inmost branch of a large tree.

“Oh, mother dear!  Mother dear!”

From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to make her lips meet, and speak.

“My wee lamb, don’t try to speak.  Just lie quiet.  It’s heaven just to be with you.  You needn’t speak.”

But Mrs. Melville fought to say it.  Something had struck her as so remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths commenting on it.  They both bent forward eagerly to hear it.  She whispered:  “Nice to have a room of one’s own.”