“Oh, it’s only a joke,” said Jeannie, “and a very small one. Must you be going?”
“We must, indeed,” said Miss Phœbe. “Come, Clara, you would linger here forever unless I tore you away. We have already far exceeded our time, and taken up far too much of Miss Avesham’s.”
The Miss Cliffords walked some little way in silence.
“There is quite an air about the house,” said Miss Clara, at length. “It is quite different from even Colonel Raymond’s, and Mrs. Raymond’s drawing-room always seemed to us so refined.”
“Yes, it was quite different,” said Phœbe, “and I don’t know how it was produced. The piano I saw was just at the same angle from the wall as ours. I am glad we have got that right, Clara.”
“I think we have too many little things about,” said Clara; “there must be ten vases on our chimneypiece, if there’s one, and I noticed there was only a clock and two candlesticks on Miss Avesham’s. Yet it looked ever so much more furnished than ours. Let us aim at a greater simplicity, Phœbe.”
The two Miss Cliffords lived in what is known as a “highly desirable detached mansion,” and its desirability was much enhanced by its being known as Montrose Villa. It is probable that the owner took his hint from Mrs. Raymond’s happy thought of calling her house “Lammermoor,” but the Miss Cliffords had gone one better, for the last six months they had dated all their letters “Villa Montrose,” and were even thinking of having a die made for their paper and envelopes. “Villa Montrose” sounded much more delightful, and gave, as Miss Clara said, while hanging a reproduction of Carlo Dolci in the front hall, “quite an Italian air to the place.” To the ordinary eye the Villa Montrose was a plain gray house, covered with stucco, but if (as the Miss Cliffords did even when alone) you called stucco, stookko, a perfectly different effect is produced. Similarly, a dwarf fir-tree which stood in the back garden was, rightly considered, a stone-pine, and visions of Tuscan valleys (the Miss Cliffords’ father had once been English chaplain at Florence) rose to the inward eye, with hardly any sense of their being pumped up from a distance. Miss Clara, in fact, got at the kernel of the matter when she said that the atmosphere with which the imagination can invest a place is wholly independent of the materials on which it works.
On the ground floor were four rooms, a drawing-room and dining-room looking out over the room, and at the back two small apartments, known as “the libry” and the studio. The walls of the studio were decorated with quite a quantity of oil pictures by the Miss Cliffords’ father, and an unfinished sketch of his stood on an easel. There was a tiger’s-skin rug on the floor, rather moth-eaten, and some low chairs. The only drawback to the room was that, as there was no fire-place, it was too cold to sit in in winter, and in summer, as it was exposed to the southern sun, and had a large sky-light, you might as well, as Miss Phœbe once remarked with a certain acrimony, make your sitting-room of an oven. But in the more temperate rays of April and September nothing could be more delightful than its temperature, and, even when it was untenantable, there was a pleasure in referring to “the studio.”
The “libry” was simply one mass of books, chiefly consisting of the theological collection of the Miss Cliffords’ father. Here Miss Clara worked every morning from nine till one, and it was in itself an inspiration to be surrounded by books, although she seldom took one from its shelf. When it is said that thirteen of the fourteen original poems by her which had appeared in the Wroxton Chronicle were produced in this room (the fourteenth was produced during an attack of influenza in bed, and was called Depression) it will be seen at once that the actual area of the “libry,” which measured eight feet by ten, was no index to its potentialities, for even Shakespeare’s house at Stratford-on-Avon is no palace, and Miss Clara, it is hardly necessary to say, was the president of the Ladies’ Literary Union, and was considered rather Bohemian.
Her elder sister, Miss Phœbe, was, as Clara had told Jeannie, musical. She had no sitting-room, for, like Martha, she was cumbered with much serving, and she knew, and was proud to know, that Clara was the genius. But some half of the drawing-room, which would hold five people easily, was known as Phœbe’s corner, and in Phœbe’s corner was a cottage piano and mandolin, and always a vase of flowers. A cabinet photograph of the mandolin teacher, Professor Rimanez, signed “Rimanez,” no less, in the Professor’s own hand, hung on the wall. Phœbe’s corner was full.