"Of course," said Hilda, brightening at the prospect of Harold's release.
"Of course," John echoed, sardonically, within himself. He did not feel that the sight of Harold's ravening after his breakfast would induce in him the right mood for Joan of Arc. So he left the breakfast table and went upstairs to his library. Here he found that some "illiterate oaf," as he characterized the person responsible, had put in upside down upon the shelves the standard works he had hastily amassed. Instead of setting his ideas in order, he had to set his books in order: and after a hot and dusty morning with the rows of unreadable classics he came downstairs to find that the vicarage party had arrived just in time for lunch, bringing with them as the advance guard of their occupation a large clothes basket filled with what Laurence described as "necessary odds and ends that might be overlooked later."
"It's my theory of moving," he added. "The small things first."
He enunciated this theory so reverently that his action acquired from his tone a momentous gravity like the captain of a ship's when he orders the women and children into the boats first.
The moving of the vicarage party lasted over a fortnight, during which John found it impossible to settle down to Joan of Arc. No sooner would he have worked himself up to a suitable frame of mind in which he might express dramatically and poetically the maid's reception of her heavenly visitants than a very hot man wearing a green baize apron would appear in the doorway of the library and announce that a chest of drawers had hopelessly involved some vital knot in the domestic communications. It was no good for John to ask Hilda to do anything: his sister had taken up the attitude that it was all John's fault, that she had done her best to preserve his peace, that her advice had been ignored, and that for the rest of her life she intended to efface herself.
"I'm a mere cipher," she kept repeating.
On one occasion when a bureau of sham ebony that looked like a blind man's dream of Cologne Cathedral had managed to wedge all its pinnacles into the lintel of the front door, John observed to Laurence he had understood that only such furniture from the vicarage as was required to supplement the Ambles furniture would be brought there.
"I thought this bureau would appeal to you," Laurence replied. "It seemed to me in keeping with much of your work."
John looked up sharply to see if he was being chaffed; but his brother-in-law's expression was earnest, and the intended compliment struck more hardly at John's self-confidence than the most malicious review.
"Does my work really seem like gimcrack gothic?" he asked himself.