“And how many bedrooms?” asked Daisy, wiping her axe on the grass.
“Five spare, so I suppose that means seven,” said Georgie, “and one with a sitting-room and bathroom attached. And a beautiful music-room.”
“Georgie, she means to live there,” said Daisy, “whether she told you or not. You don’t count the bedrooms like that in a house you’re going to sell. It isn’t done.”
“Nothing settled, I tell you,” said Georgie. “So you’ll dine with Olga on Sunday, and now I must fly and get people to lunch with her.”
“No! A lunch-party too?” asked Daisy.
“Yes. She wants to see everybody.”
“And five spare rooms, did you say?” asked Daisy, beginning to fill in her trench.
Georgie hurried out of the front gate, and Daisy shovelled the earth back and hurried indoors to impart all this news to her husband. He had a little rheumatism in his shoulder, and she gave him Coué treatment before she counterordered the chicken which she had bespoken for his dinner on Sunday.
Georgie thought it wise to go first to Olga’s house, to make sure that she had told her caretaker that she was coming down for the week-end. That was the kind of thing that prima-donnas sometimes forgot. There was a man sitting on the roof of Old Place with a coil of wire, and another sitting on the chimney. Though listening-in had not yet arrived at Riseholme, Georgie at once conjectured that Olga was installing it, and what would Lucia say? It was utterly un-Elizabethan to begin with, and though she countenanced the telephone, she had expressed herself very strongly on the subject of listening-in. She had had an unfortunate experience of it herself, for on a visit to London not long ago, her hostess had switched it on, and the company was regaled with a vivid lecture on pyorrhœa by a hospital nurse.... Georgie, however, would see Olga before Lucia came to dinner on Sunday and would explain her abhorrence of the instrument.
Then there was the delightful task of asking everybody to lunch. It was the hour now when Riseholme generally was popping in and out of shops, and finding out the news. It was already known that Georgie had dined with Lucia last night and that Pepino had gone to his aunt’s funeral, and everyone was agog to ascertain if anything definite had yet been ascertained about the immense fortune which had certainly come to the Lucases.... Mrs. Antrobus spied Georgie going into Olga’s house (for the keenness of her eyesight made up for her deafness), and there she was with her ear-trumpet adjusted, looking at the view just outside Old Place when Georgie came out. Already the popular estimate had grown like a gourd.