Quartet in Autumn

by Barbara Pym

The room itself was quite pleasant, sparsely furnished, which was a good thing, and there was a basin with hot and cold water, as Edwin had said. Letty felt like a governess in a Victorian novel arriving at a new post, but there would be no children here and no prospect of a romantic attachment to the widower master of the house or a handsome son of the family. Her own particular situation had hardly existed in the past, for now it was the unattached working woman, the single ‘business lady’ of the advertisements, who was most likely to arrive in the house of strangers. Letty had often found herself doing this, arranging her clothes in the drawers and wardrobe provided and putting out her personal possessions, the things that might give some clue as to what sort of person she was. There were her books – anthologies of poetry, though nothing later than Poems of Today. Second Series – her current library book; her transistor radio, a bowl of hyacinths nearly in flower, her knitting in a flowered cretonne bag. There were no photographs, not even of her friend Marjorie or of her old home, her parents, a cat or a dog.