“These cottages are only a stepping-stone to greater things, Miss Dunnock. I have mortgaged them already. What Linton lacks is a high-class Temperance Hotel, overlooking the river. Such a hotel would attract visitors for the fishing and boating, and would cater also for the more respectable commercial men. A Temperance Hotel would wake up trade in the town, and would provide a delightful centre for holiday-makers and abstainers, and men from the university.”
“What shall I say to Rachel?” Anne asked herself as she followed the grocer up the little staircase into the poky bedrooms, which smelt of varnish.
“A little shop like ours is a great snare for a man with ambition. I have wasted the best years of my life in it, years during which I might have built up a great merchandising house. But this hotel, and others like it, will soon make my son a rich man, and provide for Rachel. A Temperance Hotel with a grand loggia looking over the river, pillars with climbing roses, a small winter garden with azaleas.... We must move with the times, you know, Miss Dunnock.”
Anne descended the narrow stairs and followed Mrs. Sotheby across a patch of sticky clay to the dog-cart.
“Yes, I am going to Paris. Don’t tell anyone; it is a secret,” she said to the little girl as they drove off. It was only after saying this that Anne looked up at the cottages, seeing them for the first time. Their extreme ugliness and the evident signs of jerry-building dismayed her.
“What will the next thing be like?” she asked herself, remembering the grocer had spoken of an hotel, and expecting to see it round the corner. In a moment or two Mr. Sotheby drew rein by the side of the quiet stream of the Ouse, but there was no building visible, only an empty field, the site for the new hotel.
“A lounge hall lit entirely by windows of yellow stained glass is my idea,” said Mr. Sotheby. “It will give the effect of sunshine all the year round. The landing-stage is to run the entire length of the building. It will be covered by a glass roof. There is to be a garage on the right and a boathouse on the left, each under its own dome of glass, thus giving symmetry to the whole. There will be central heating, a lift, electric light, a banqueting hall....”
Anne gazed at the water-logged field, at the slow stream with the bunches of reeds and the gasworks on the opposite bank, and ceased to listen to Mr. Sotheby’s words. The mud and water and slime would remain mud and water and slime; the fine old bridge with the toll house, which had once been a chapel, would stay there; nothing would move the gasworks, and Anne felt unable to picture to herself the glittering abomination of which the grocer spoke, on that melancholy river bank.
But Mr. Sotheby went on talking for some time, and, turning her head, Anne could see that his wife was not listening, and her own attention soon wandered. She saw the whip being pointed first in one direction and then in another, and the white beard which wagged as the grocer opened and shut his mouth, but the stream of words went on unheard. At last Mr. Sotheby picked up the reins, cracked his whip, and they set off for home. Except for Rachel, they had enjoyed themselves as Mrs. Sotheby had predicted.
No one in Dry Coulter would have recognized the slim figure in a fashionable tailor-made dress who took her seat in the boat-train three days later. When she shook her head to refuse the offer of magazines, no hairpins flew on to the platform, and the reason was explained when she removed her rakish little hat: Anne wore an Eton crop. Her whole character seemed to her to have changed, and looking into the mirror in the lid of her little vanity-case, she was pleased with her new self. For a moment she fingered an unused lip-stick and then, laughing to herself, deliberately reddened her lips. She was off to Paris, alone, to seek her fortune. Her father, everyone at Dry Coulter, every experience she had ever had in her life seemed never to have existed. It was a dream which would be speedily forgotten, and reaching for her bag, Anne opened a French book of which Richard had spoken.