“I say, Giles, you did serve us a turn last night! Your wire never got here until this morning! We sat up till eleven!”
They wore knitted jumpers and had corn-coloured hair and pink faces. They were delighted to see their brother back after his misadventures; the dogs were delighted to see him; only the dogs did not shout, which was an advantage. Alix had never heard such a noise.
“And here is Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, who had stopped to take the appealing fox terrier in her arms; the fox terrier was a lady, no longer young, and the uproar affected her too much; Mrs. Bradley soothed and reassured her.
Ruth and Rosemary, as though aware for the first time of Alix’s presence, turned their attention to her and cried “Hello” heartily, while they shook her by the hand. They were like Aunt Bella in their rosiness, robustness, their air of doing things all the time with absorption and energy; and like Aunt Bella and the house they were “peu intéressantes.”
“Did you have a good crossing? Are you a good sailor?” asked Rosemary; while Ruth said: “Let me carry up her bag.—Do you play hockey?—Jouissez-vous le hockey?”
“She speaks English better than you do,” said Giles, pulling his sister’s rope of hair; “and your French is a disgrace to your family.”
They all went into a hall that had wide windows in unexpected places and an important oak staircase winding up from it, also in an unexpected place. Alix was dimly aware of earnest, cheerful attempts at originality in its design; but the originality did not go beyond the windows and staircases, the high wainscotting and oaken pillars. Everything else, from the brasses of the big chimney-place to the florid crétonnes on the window-seats, followed a bright household formula. The brightness would have been a little oppressive had it not lapsed to a benign shabbiness, and the two good-tempered maids who followed with Alix’s box belonged to it all, ornamental in their crisp pink print dresses, yet a little dishevelled; their caps perched far back on large protuberances of hair and fashionable whiskers of curl coming forward on their cheeks.
Alix felt all sorts of things about the hall and about the crétonnes and about the maids as Ruth and Rosemary and the dogs hustled her along. What it amounted to she did not clearly know, except that Giles did not really go with the hall, while his sisters did, and that Mrs. Bradley did not like the caps and the whiskers, but that she would always sacrifice her own tastes—hardly aware that she had them—to other people’s cheerfulness.
“Oh, well, of course you play tennis,” Ruth was saying. “Everybody plays tennis. But you must learn hockey at once. It’s the great game at our school and you’re nowhere unless you play it.—Down Bobby, down! He’s made friends with you already.—The mud will come off all right.—One can’t mind mud if one has dogs, can one? Down, you silly duffer!”
“Never mind. Let him jump. I am fond of dogs,” said Alix, patting the ardent head of the Irish terrier. “What is the name of the little, low, white one? He is quieter, but I think he likes me too.”