"And that precious lamb upstairs never made a sound."
"The young rascal! He knew. He knew," the adoptive father idiotically chuckled.
Jasmine wondered what he was supposed to know—perhaps, she thought with a shade of malice, that he might one day inherit Uncle Matthew's fortune if Uncle Matthew died in ignorance of his existence. She could not bring herself to imagine that any money would be left to Lettice and Pamela. Ah, but there were others whom she had not yet seen, those six boy cousins at Silchester, and Uncle Alexander with his lunatic prince. Why had she ever consented to leave Sirene? Whichever way she looked in England there was nothing to be seen except an endless vista of servitude. Girls in books always struck out for themselves, but perhaps they were the only girls who were written about. There must be hundreds of others like herself who remained slaves. Not at all, they finally got married; they worked hard and....
"It's really a ghastly prospect," she exclaimed aloud.
"Uscirò pazza! I'm like some cheap novel in a circulating library gradually getting more and more dog's-eared, more and more dirty and greasy, and all the time being passed on and on—oh! I can't stand it much longer...."
Jasmine did not set out to Muswell Hill with much hope in her heart. She felt as if she was being posted to Matthew Rouncivell, Esq., and the kisses of her uncle and aunt remained on her cheeks like postage stamps.
Rouncivell Lodge was a double-fronted, two-storied house which was built of brown brick in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, probably by some prosperous city merchant, as a country residence. It had remained what was practically a country residence until a few years ago, when old Matthew Rouncivell sacrificed the couple of acres of garden behind the house and built on the site large blocks of bright red flats, leaving no land to his own house except the shrubbery in front, which was divided into three segments by a semicircular drive; in the largest of these stood a Doric summer-house converted by Mr. Rouncivell into a smoking-room. The proximity of the flats and the amount of sky they cut off added to the gloom of the shrubbery, which was a mass of rank ivy and euonymus bushes, of American rhododendrons, lilacs that never flowered, privets, and Portuguese laurels. Moreover, although the flats were what the agent called high-class residential flats, the landlord, possibly with the vague notion of guarding what was left of the privacy he had himself destroyed, had had them planned to present to anybody entering the gates of Rouncivell Lodge their domestic windows, which, with dish-cloths drying on every sill, gave them the squalid appearance of tenement buildings.
The old gentleman himself, when, wearing his velvet smoking-jacket, his tasselled smoking-cap, and a pair of goloshes over his fur slippers, he visited the smoking-room to smoke his weekly cigar, found the flavour of the cigar was enhanced by calculating how much a year each window in sight brought him in. This meditation was so comforting that he used really to enjoy his smoke, although the cigars, which were of poor quality when he bought them, had not been improved by their storage in the damp Doric summer-house. However, he smoked them literally to the bitter end; this bitter end he used to stick upon a penknife, and even when each puff nearly blistered his tongue he still enjoyed it, because he had made a calculation that merely by the amount more of a cigar he smoked than anyone else he had gained on the whole year two complete cigars. He was always making calculations. He would even calculate how much each spine of the shark's backbone that was the only decoration of the walls of his smoking-room cost him. And as for the cost of Jasmine's food, he could have told you to a spoonful of soup.
The centre of Rouncivell Lodge was occupied by a very wide staircase lighted from above by a large skylight and bounded by walls the entire area of which was covered with a collection of astonishingly banal pictures. The visitor realized with a shock of knowledge that the pictures from the exhibition of the Royal Academy went every year to accommodation provided by staircases like this. The most rapid, the most inattentive glance at these pictures was enough to produce a sense of almost intolerable fatigue, because each picture was so obviously what it set out to be that the eye was not allowed a blink between a Sussex down, a Devonshire harbour, a Dorset pasture, and a London slum, and the amount of narrative compressed into the space was as if a dozen bad novelists had simultaneously read a dozen of their worst chapters. The massed effect was as confused and brilliant as a wall covered with varnished scraps. The brightness of the staircase and the gaudiness of the pictures were accentuated by the comparative gloom of the rooms on either side, particularly those at the back of the house, which from having been designed to look over a spacious garden were some of them now only six feet from the walls of the new flats. The still close atmosphere created by windows that were never opened from one year's end to the other was tainted by the odour of varnish and stale sunlight; the rooms on the ground floor smelt perpetually of half-past-two on Sunday afternoon, partly of clean linen, partly of gravy.
There were six bedrooms, all of them with large four-poster beds, and all of them haunted by that strange frigidity, that frigidity almost of death which is produced by the least superfluity of china. They were furnished in an eclectic style, but the china was kept strictly to its own kind; thus one bedroom would be red, blue, and gold with Crown Derby; another, and this the most attractive, rose and lavender with Lowestoft; and there was one nightmare of a room filled with black and rose Sèvres.