“Then we’ll get new papers,” Roland said.
There were moments when it seemed that things could not be possibly finished in time. On the last week of March there was not a carpet on the floor, not a curtain over a window, not a picture on the walls.
“I know what it’ll be,” said Muriel in despair, “we shall have to go and leave it half finished, and while we’re away mother’ll arrange it according to her own ideas, and her ideas are not mine. It’ll take us all the rest of our lives getting things out of the places where she has put them. It’s going to be awful, Roland, I know it is. We oughtn’t to have arranged our marriage till we’d arranged our house.”
Muriel was a little difficult during those days, but Roland was very patient and very affectionate.
“You only wait,” he said; “it looks pretty awful now, but one good day’s shopping’ll make a jolly big difference.”
And it did. In one week they bought all the carpets, the curtains, the chairs and tables, and Gerald was dispatched with a list that Mrs. Marston had drawn up of the uninteresting things—saucepans, frying-pans, crockery—and with a blank check. “We can’t be bothered with those things,” said Roland.
It was a hectic week. They had decided to spend three hundred pounds on furnishing, and every evening, for Roland was staying with the Marstons, the two of them sat down to adjust their accounts, and to Muriel, who had never experienced a moment’s anxiety about money, this checking of a balance-sheet was a delightful game. It was such fun pretending to be poor, adding up figures, comparing price-lists, as though each penny mattered. She would sit, her pencil on her lips, her account book on one side, her price-list on the other, and would look up at Roland with an imploring, helpless glance, and: “Roland, dear, there’s such a beautiful wardrobe here; it’s fifty pounds, but it’ll hold all my things; do you think we can afford it?”
And Roland would assume dire deliberation: “Well,” he would say, after an impressive pause, “I think we can, only we’ll have to be very careful over the servant’s bedroom if we get it.” And Muriel would throw her arms round his neck and assure him that he was a darling, and then turn again to the price-list.
And all the while the wedding presents were arriving by every post. That, too, was great fun, or rather it had been at the start.
The first parcels were opened with unbounded enthusiasm.