§2
And so the woman who had been a girl three weeks ago, this tall, dark-eyed, slightly perplexed and very young-looking lady, was introduced to the home that had been made for her. She went about it with an alarmed sense of strange responsibilities, not in the least feeling that anything was being given to her. And Sir Isaac led her from point to point full of the pride and joy of new possession—for it was his first own house as well as hers—rejoicing over it and exacting gratitude.
“It’s all right, isn’t it?” he asked looking up at her.
“It’s wonderful. I’d no idea.”
“See,” he said, indicating a great brass bowl of perennial sunflowers on the landing, “your favourite flower!”
“My favourite flower?”
“You said it was—in that book. Perennial sunflower.”
She was perplexed and then remembered.
She understood now why he had said downstairs, when she had glanced at a big photographic enlargement of a portrait of Doctor Barnardo, “your favourite hero in real life.”
He had brought her at Hythe one day a popular Victorian device, a confession album, in which she had had to write down on a neat rose-tinted page, her favourite author, her favourite flower, her favourite colour, her favourite hero in real life, her “pet aversion,” and quite a number of such particulars of her subjective existence. She had filled this page in a haphazard manner late one night, and she was disconcerted to find how thoroughly her careless replies had come home to roost. She had put down “pink” as her favourite colour because the page she was writing upon suggested it, and the paper of the room was pale pink, the curtains strong pink with a pattern of paler pink and tied with large pink bows, and the lamp shades, the bedspread, the pillow-cases, the carpet, the chairs, the very crockery—everything but the omnipresent perennial sunflowers—was pink. Confronted with this realization, she understood that pink was the least agreeable of all possible hues for a bedroom. She perceived she had to live now in a chromatic range between rather underdone mutton and salmon. She had said that her favourite musical composers were Bach and Beethoven; she really meant it, and a bust of Beethoven materialized that statement, but she had made Doctor Barnardo her favourite hero in real life because his name also began with a B and she had heard someone say somewhere that he was a very good man. The predominance of George Eliot’s pensive rather than delightful countenance in her bedroom and the array of all that lady’s works in a lusciously tooled pink leather, was due to her equally reckless choice of a favourite author. She had said too that Nelson was her favourite historical character, but Sir Isaac with a delicate jealousy had preferred to have this heroic but regrettably immoral personality represented in his home only by an engraving of the Battle of Copenhagen....
She stood surveying this room, and her husband watched her eagerly. She was, he felt, impressed at last!...
Certainly she had never seen such a bedroom in her life. By comparison even with the largest of the hotel apartments they had occupied it was vast; it had writing-tables and a dainty bookcase and a blushing sofa, and dressing-tables and a bureau and a rose-red screen and three large windows. Her thoughts went back to the narrow little bedroom at Penge with which she had hitherto been so entirely content. Her own few little books, a photograph or so,—they’d never dare to come here, even if she dared to bring them.
“Here,” said Sir Isaac, flinging open a white door, “is your dressing-room.”
She was chiefly aware of a huge white bath standing on a marble slab under a window of crinkled pink-stained glass, and of a wide space of tiled floor with white fur rugs.
“And here,” he said, opening a panel that was covered by wall paper, “is my door.”
“Yes,” he said to the question in her eyes, “that’s my room. You got this one—for your own. It’s how people do now. People of our position.... There’s no lock.”
He shut the door slowly again and surveyed the splendours he had made with infinite satisfaction.
“All right?” he said, “isn’t it?”... He turned to the pearl for which the casket was made, and slipped an arm about her waist. His arm tightened.
“Got a kiss for me, Elly?” he whispered.
At this moment, a gong almost worthy of Snagsby summoned them to tea. It came booming in to them with a vast officious arrogance that brooked no denial. It made one understand the imperatives of the Last Trump, albeit with a greater dignity.... There was a little awkward pause.
“I’m so dirty and trainy,” she said, disengaging herself from his arm. “And we ought to go to tea.”