In The Village, Marghanita Laski uses the decorative arts to great, clever, and sometimes comic effect and to illustrate the village’s elaborately calibrated social stratification. Retired headmistress Miss Porteous is creating a William Morris-style home by acquiring Arts and Crafts pieces (she even calls her house 'Kelmscott' after the original, above), so is taken aback to discover that ex-trade Miss Moodie lives with genuine, inherited A&C furniture. "Miss Moodie’s room was not so very different to the sort of room she had chosen for herself. The walls had been distempered a nice warm cream, the curtains at the casement windows were of that charming mock cross stitch mock Jacobean linen, and the furniture instead of being the tightly-stuffed elaborately veneered walnut most tradespeople bought consisted of what Miss Porteous immediately sized up as A Few Good Pieces – a small gate-leg table, a long rush-seated oak stool, a painted pine corner cupboard which was surely some genuine old lustre china inside".