Arabella, who is a very affectionate dog, flung herself down beside her master, taking up a large share of the rug, and pensively chewed gorse half the time, the other half being absorbed in extracting its prickles from her chest. Laddie, of course, slipped off to the chase. The two little dogs, russet brother and little white sister, whiled away a period of inaction: Betty, by circling round the bath-chair, jumping in to assure its occupant that she loved her very much and out again to show that she was a dog of tact; and Loki, panting in his great fur coat ‹in which condition he grins like a Chinese dragon with his roseleaf tongue bent back in the oddest little loop between his white teeth› by seeking cool spots wherein to repose—preferably under the very wheel of the chair, to his Grandmother’s distraction.
An afternoon to remember, when nothing happened but the greatest happenings of all: God’s good gifts of sun and wild moor and balmy air!
XXXI
The really artistic member of the famiglia is Juvenal. He settles all the flowers; and for that alone—for the pleasure he gets from it and the pleasure he gives—he is worth his weight in gold. The little gold and mother-of-pearl tinted Italian drawing-room is always a bower. Yesterday, on the silver table which stands beneath a silver and gold Ikon, he set a vase of white and yellow Roses. It was a touch of genius! We are quite sick of reading how beautiful Primroses look in Benares brass bowls. Personally, we dislike brass bowls for flowers. Glass! Glass! There is nothing as good as glass, especially when you have the luck to possess, as we did, a case of old Dutch moulded bottles. They were made in all kinds of delicious angles—three-cornered, square, hexagonal—with Tulips stamped in the glass: in such as these a couple of long-stemmed Roses or Irises, and especially Tulips and Daffodils, are at their very best.
We have said “they were.” Alas for those Dutch bottles, and for our folly, improvident wretches as we are, in setting them about for our own pleasure, instead of shutting them up in a cabinet! Of what were once eleven perfect irreplaceable treasures ‹the twelfth had a large chip off its neck from the beginning›, there are only five left! Tittums, the splendid savage “smoke Persian,” swept the biggest and best off a chimney-piece with taps of a deliberately evil paw.... And the rest have gone the way of vases!
“Very sorry, Miss” ‹it’s generally to the Signorina they come: she takes the edge off the Padrona’s fury›. “I don’t know how it happened, I’m sure. It came to pieces——”
‹Oh, let us stay our pen! Every owner of precious bric-à-brac knows the awful sound of those words, and the futility of resentment.›