I haven't "disentangled" the different hats and faces and voices and costumes; I suppose I shall do so in due course, and shall be able to give a clear description of each one of these callers "from the neighbourhood" upon Miss Million. I knew she would be an object of curiosity to any neighbourhood to which she came!
And I wonder how many of these people know that she is one of the heroines of the Rattenheimer ruby case, that hangs over our heads like a veritable sword of Damocles the whole time!
But to get on to the principal excitement of the afternoon—the utterly unlooked-for surprise that awaited me in the kitchen!
The typically Welsh kitchen in this newly acquired place of Miss Million's is to me the nicest room in the house.
I love its spaciousness and its slate floor, and the ponderous oak beams that bisect its smoke-blackened ceiling and are hung with bunches of dried herbs and with hams.
I love its dresser, full of willow-pattern china, and its two big china dogs that face each other on the high mantelpiece.
The row of bright brass candlesticks appeals to me, and the grandfather's clock, with the sun, moon, and stars on its face, and the smooth-scrubbed white deal kitchen-table pitted with tiny worm-holes, and the plants in the window, and everything about it.
Miss Million declares she never saw such a kitchen "in all her puff." Putney was inconvenient enough, the dear knows, but the Putney kitchen was a joke to this one, where the kitchen range you can only describe "as a fair scandal," and nothing else!
If she means to take the landlord's offer, later on, and to take this place as it stands, she's going to have everything pretty different.
I should be sorry if she did; I like the place to be an utter anachronism in our utilitarian twentieth century, just as it is. I don't mind the honeycomb of draughts. I can put up with the soft, cave-like gloom of it——