“How you can go on, I don’t know,” she said. “You play all the time we play, and work all the time we rest. You make me feel lazy too, which I resent.”
“Darling, I will make you feel industrious this afternoon,” said Catherine, “because I want you and Jim to stop here, and criticise and alter and direct till the ballroom and this room and the staircase are all absolutely perfect. You know what I want done: I want you to see that it is done. Don’t judge by daylight only. Have the blinds and curtains drawn, and see that it looks right by electric light. I shall not be able to get home till just before dinner, and then it will be too late. English decorators are hopeless; they know as much about decoration as I know about the lunar theory. I wonder they haven’t sent some plush monkeys climbing up into spiders’ webs to hang in the windows.”
“They sent hundreds of yellow calceolarias,” said Ruby, “which is about as bad. I sent them all back. And poor Mr. Hopkinson didn’t seem to know what wild-flowers were, when I told him you wanted wild-flowers all up the staircase.”
“He knows now,” remarked Lady Thurso.
It was probable that poor Mr. Hopkinson did “know now,” for ever since morning tall flowering grasses, meadow-sweet, cornflowers, cistus, ox-eye daisies, tendrils of wild-rose, clumps of buttercups, and all the myriad herbage of rural June, had been poured into the house, and the staircase, with great boughs of hawthorn and rose overhanging the lowlier growths, was like an apotheosised lane lying between ribands of shaded hayfield. Lady Thurso, inheriting the American love of doing something which has never been done before, a thing which leads to failure in a dozen cases, and hits the bull’s-eye on the lucky thirteenth, had never been better inspired, and the staircase, a rather heavy and not very admirable feature in the house, had been gloriously transformed by the lightness and spring of this feathery decoration. But poor Mr. Hopkinson’s ignorance of what wild-flowers were had been capped by his ignorance of how wild-flowers grew, and the original order to decorate the stairs with only wild-flowers had led to his placing the poor dears in neat and orderly rows, as in a riband bed. Consequently, he and his assistant florists had, about twelve-thirty that morning, to demolish and begin all over again, having first, under Lady Thurso’s supervision, “made a salad” of all these fragrant hampers of flowers and grasses, and then stuck them “properly”—that is to say, absolutely at random—into the trays of moist clay and troughs of water that lined each side of the staircase, which would keep them alive and bright-eyed till morning.
There was still five minutes before the carriage came, and Lady Thurso, “while the bread was yet in her mouth,” hurried out to see if Mr. Hopkinson had at length grasped the nature of her scheme. It appeared that he had. The staircase was a country lane, just as she had visualised it. And, somehow, with the adaptability that was as natural to her as is the sympathetic change of colour in a chameleon, as she stood below a clump of flowering hawthorn, she looked, for all her air of the world and patrician aspect, like some exquisite milkmaid, the embodiment of Queen Elizabeth’s ideal. But the milkmaid had the critical eye, and she looked very slowly and carefully up and down this vista of the hayfields.
“More buttercups in that corner,” she said—“all in a clump like sunlight—and another big bough of hawthorn—two boughs. Not twigs like that, just buttonholes, but boughs.”
She waited, sitting on the top step with Ruby, till this was done; then eagerly, but carefully, she looked at it again with her eyes half shut.
“I think it will do,” she said, “but please have all the curtains drawn, dear Ruby, and look at it by electric light. I’m not sure there is enough yellow even yet. I hope it won’t give Thurso hay-fever, for he and I will be planted here till the royal quadrille begins. He and Maud get here this afternoon.”