“Do you think so, Muriel?” he said. “Well, I don’t know; around here it’s a right pleasant place to live—nice big yards and trees and all. And you know the population is increasing by fifteen to twenty thousand every year. The papers say——”
“Listen, Renfrew,” she interrupted, and then said deliberately: “It is a cultural desert, utterly savourless!”
When she had spoken in this way, the first feeling of young Mr. Mears appeared to be one of admiration, and perhaps she understood, or even expected, that some such sensation on his part would be inevitable, for she allowed her eyes to remain uplifted gloomily toward the summer sky above them, so that he might look at her a little while without her seeming to know it. Then she repeated slowly, with a slight shake of the head: “Yes—a cultural desert, utterly savourless!”
But Renfrew now became uneasy. “You mean the looks of the place and the——”
“I mean the whole environment,” she said. “These Victorian houses with their Victorian interiors and the Victorian thoughts of the people that live in ’em. It’s all, all Victorian!”
“ ‘Victorian?’ ” said Renfrew doubtfully, for he was far from certain of her meaning. His vague impression was that the word might in some remote way bear upon an issue of bonds with which he had some recent familiarity through an inheritance from his grandfather. “You think it’s—Victorian—do you, Muriel?” he thought best to inquire.
“Absolutely!” she said. “Culturally it’s a Victorian desert and utterly savourless.”
“But you don’t mean all of it?” he ventured, being now certain that “Victorian” meant something unfavourable. “That is, not the people?”
“It’s the people I’m talking about,” explained Muriel coldly.
“Well—but not all of ’em?”