I don't care; you were only a year older than I am now when you told Rags kindly to go to the dickens. You said he cared only for your money, poor Rags! That wasn't true. But now (I know you won't tell) Ena R. is going for him for all she's worth. Mubs doesn't notice anything about women except their being suffs or not; and I'm supposed to be too young to twig what's going on. I need hardly mention, however, that very little gets past yours truly. I shouldn't wonder if Ena'd bring it off. Rags asks me sometimes in a sheep-faced sort of way what I think of things here, and I would have a joyous laugh with him if it weren't for the brother.
Goodness gracious, but they're rich, these Rollses! I could make a pun about their name and their money, but I won't,
because it would be cheap, and nothing is cheap at Sea Gull Manor. You can get a faint idea what the house and the view are like from the hand-painted sketch at the top of this paper on the left of the fat gold crest. This stationery is in all the guests' private sitting-rooms in case any one wants to make distant friends envious of their surroundings. Mr. Rolls, Sr., told me he kept a tame artist painting these things at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, dinner and luncheon menus thrown in. Ena's idea. She wanted something original, and what she wants goes! So says Mr. R.
He's a poor little, yellow shrimp of a man, with dead-black hair, where it isn't gray or coming off, and the same kind of beard goats have. His eyes may have been nice when he was young, but nothing like his son Peter's. Young Peter is altogether different from old Peter, and he has blue eyes like the quaintest and most melting mother you ever saw.
She does nothing but crochet trimming for sheets and things, world without end, and if you admire it she gives you some. But she was just born to be a mother, and even having her sit crocheting in a room where you are makes you feel good. She has eyes as blue as bluebells, and as young, an apple face with a smile that longs for something it's never known, and any amount of smooth white hair, which she does in just the wrong way, pinched into tight braids. The one thing she won't do for her daughter is to have a maid of her own, and Ena keeps apologizing for it.
Mr. Rolls is a terrible dyspeptic, and the only things he can digest (he has told me and Rags several times) are soft-shelled crabs, devilled, and plum pudding or cake. When he has a pain he paces floors like a tiger, but does not roar.
I haven't met many Americans here yet because the Rollses somehow don't seem to know the right ones, and Ena makes excuses for that, too. I wish she wouldn't. It gets on my nerves, and Rag's nerves as well, I fancy, though he doesn't say so, and he's thinking a lot about whether she'll do. Because I haven't met many others, I don't know whether or not the Rollses are just like all American millionaires who don't come abroad, or unique. But I have an idea they're unique.
This is the most enormous house, built and named to please
Ena, though it's no more a manor than the Albert Hall is. I don't believe she knows what "manor" means. Every bedroom I've seen (and I think I've been shown all, if I haven't lost count) has its own bathroom adjoining, and a sitting-room as well. In each bathroom there are several different kinds of baths, and a marble one you step down into, but it's bitterly cold on your spine—the only cold thing in the house, which is so hot with a furnace that even the walls and floors feel warm, although I keep my windows wide open day and night.
The pillow-cases and sheets are made of such rich, thick linen, and are so smooth and polished that you slip down off your pillows with a crick in your neck, and the sheets slide off you, just as if they were made of heavy silver, like lids of dishes. Perhaps the monograms and crests drag them down. It's awful, but it's grand. And I should think there are at least twenty footmen with—if you'll believe me—powdered hair!