I've just sent 'em out to pick flowers to keep 'em quiet." As he spoke he gathered up awkwardly, with a curious over-motion of his broad shoulders, as if he would conceal the action, various articles in his path.

When he opened the door into the bedroom he crammed them behind it with a quick, shifty motion.
The kitchen had been repulsive, but the bedroom fairly shocked with the very indelicacy of untidiness.

Jerome felt an actual modesty about entering this room, in which so many disclosures of the closest secrets of the flesh were made.

The very dust and discolorations of the poor furnishings, the confined air, made one turn one's face aside as from too coarse a betrayal of personal reserve.

The naked indecency of domestic life seemed to display and vaunt itself, sparing none of its homely and ungraceful details, to the young man on the threshold of the room.
"Laury 'ain't had a chance to redd up this, either," poor John Upham whispered in his ear, and gathered up with a furtive swoop some linen from the floor.
"Oh, that's all right!" Jerome whispered back, and entered boldly, shutting as it were all the wretched disclosures of the room out of his consciousness, and all effort to do was needless when he saw Mrs.
Upham's face.
Laura Upham's great hollow eyes, filled with an utter passiveness of despair, stared up at him out of a sallow gloom of face.