'Capable of being added to?'
'Of course,' said Ross, 'very true, indeed, about the only thing you could honestly say of it. You could build a new house around it and use the present structure for a coal-hole. Next, please. I feel St Julian's will be the one, Florrie.'
This, however, proved to be a young barrack. If there were eighteen rooms, there were hundreds, I should think. The type of house that a polygamist might fancy. Damp oozed from the walls and most of the paper had peeled off and lay in little mouldering heaps on the floor. Rats scuttled in the wainscoting, and in the bathroom, which was on the ground floor, lay two or three of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen.
'You see,' said Ross, pointing to them with great pride, 'how the charm works. "My wife is afraid of beetles"—you get them—beautiful specimens. You want a house not quite finished—you are sent to one tumbling down. Now, if this could be worked out to its logical conclusion you would, of course, get your ideal home. I must do it on paper and try to get a formula. Let's go back to the agents, Florrie.'
'Not I—never again,' I said. So we returned to Fernfold for lunch. It's so jolly now the Spiders have gone. The Poppet has a nice day nursery and Ross a better bedroom. He says he misses the lumps in his mattress dreadfully, and his bed is now so comfortable that he cannot sleep.
To-night, after I was in 'my byes,' as the Gidger calls it, Ross came to say good-night. He was so quaint.
'Meg, something that you said to-day has rankled horribly.'
'Practically everything you say every day always does with me.'
'No, but Meg, do I ever put bad words into your mind?'
'Oh, Ross,' I said, and giggled hopelessly.