Sisters by Ada Cambridge — Read

There was an attic at the top of a dark flight of stairs in the suburban villa that was now the sisters' home. It contained a fireplace and a long dormer window -- three square casements in a row, of which the outer pair opened like doors -- facing the morning sun and a country landscape. The previous tenants had used it for a box and lumber room, and left it cobwebbed, filthy and asphyxiating. Deb ordered a charwoman to clean it, and a man to distemper the grubby plaster and stain the floor, and then laid down rugs, and assembled tables and books, and basket-chairs, and girls' odds and ends; whereby it was transformed into a cosy boudoir and their favourite room. Hither came Mary when she could escape from that treadmill of which she never spoke, bringing her black-eyed boy to astonish his aunts with his cleverness, and astonishing them herself with the heretical notions which an intimate association with orthodoxy seemed to have implanted in her.

But Bennet was not admitted, nor any other outsider.