Anna would willingly have made friends with her, but Verity advised her to wait.

"Babs will not be sociable until she has had her tea," she remarked; "we had better take no notice of her for the present," and indeed that much-enduring and long-suffering infant was at that moment so reduced by famine as to attempt swallowing her own dimpled fist.
"What a capital boy she would make!" thought Anna as she followed Mrs.
Keston into the dining-room; for the dark, closely-cropped head and a certain boyish freedom of step and bearing gave her this idea.
The dining-room was rather a gloomy apartment; the front windows were high and narrow, and the overhanging balcony rather obscured the light; the folding-doors had been taken away, but though this added to the size of the room, there was no additional cheerfulness gained, as the glass door in the inner room, which once had opened into a pleasant garden, now merely led into a covered way to the studio.
This sombre apartment was furnished in a curious manner, which made people open their eyes with astonishment until they found out that Amias Keston had acquired his household goods at second-hand sales.
The table of good Spanish mahogany had been a bargain, but it hardly harmonised with a Sheraton cabinet and a light oak sideboard, though both were good of their kind.

Then the chairs had been picked up singly, and were of all sizes and patterns.

Amias always sat in a grandfather chair of carved dark oak at the bottom of the table, and Verity in a high-backed chair in light oak and red morocco, while others were rosewood, mahogany, or Sheraton.

Nothing matched, nothing harmonized; it was merely a curiosity shop in which they stored their purchases.