"There's nothing else you'll be wanting this morning, sir?" she turned to ask in accents that seemed to convey forgiveness of her master in spite of everything.
"No, thank you, Mrs. Worfolk. Please send Maud up to help me pack. Good heavens," he added to himself when his housekeeper had left the room, "why shouldn't I be allowed a country house? And I suppose the next thing is that James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor will all be offended because I didn't go tearing round to see them the moment I arrived. One's relations never understand that after the production of a play one requires a little rest. Besides, I must get on with my new play. I absolutely must."
John's tendency to abhor the vacuum of success was corrected by the arrival of Maud, the parlor-maid, whose statuesque anemia and impersonal neatness put something in it. Before leaving for America he had supplemented the rather hasty preliminary furnishing of his new house by ordering from his tailor a variety of country costumes. These Maud, with feminine intuition superimposed on what she would have called her "understanding of valeting," at once produced for his visit to Ambles; John in the prospect of half a dozen unworn peat-perfumed suits of tweed flung behind him any lingering doubt about there being something in success, and with the recapture of his enthusiasm for what he called "jolly things" was anxious that Maud should share in it.
"Do you think these new things are a success, Maud?" he asked, perhaps a little too boisterously. At any rate, the parlor-maid's comprehension of valeting had apparently never been so widely stretched, for a faint coralline blush tinted her waxen cheeks.
"They seem very nice, sir," she murmured, with a slight stress upon the verb.
John felt that he had trespassed too far upon the confines of Maud's humanity and retreated hurriedly. He would have liked to explain that his inquiry had merely been a venture into abstract esthetics and that he had not had the least intention of extracting her opinion about these suits on him; but he felt that an attempt at explanation would embarrass her, and he hummed instead over a selection of ties, as a bee hums from flower to flower in a garden, careless of the gardener who close at hand is potting up plants.
"I will take these ties," he announced on the last stave of A Fine Old English Gentleman.
Maud noted them gravely.
"And I shall have a few books. Perhaps there won't be room for them?"
"There won't be room for them, not in your dressing-case, sir."