XV
KENILWORTH
THERE are some very pleasant shops in Warwick, and if you have time and no money you can spend some very agreeable mornings wandering from one shop to another, asking the prices of things you have all the will but none of the means to buy. If you have money and time you will buy a few of the things whose prices you have asked. Edward bought a ring, crystal with brilliants around it, very lovely and very expensive, and some topazes set in old silver, quite as beautiful but not so dear.
Then they went to the old-furniture shops, where he excited the vexed admiration of the dealers by his unerring eye for fakes. He bought an oak chest, carved with a shield of arms, the date 1612, and the initials "I. B."
"If we were really married," he told her, "I should be vandal enough to alter that 'I' to make it stand for your name."
"I should not think it a vandal's act—if we were married," she answered, and their eyes met. He bought tables and chairs of oak and beech; a large French cupboard whose age, he said, made it a fit mate for the chest; he bought a tall clock with three tarnished gold pines atop, and some brass pots and pewter plates. She strayed away from him at the last shop, while he was treating for a Welsh dresser with brass handles, and when he had made his bargain he followed her, to find her lovingly fingering chairs of papier-mâché painted with birds and flowers and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There was a table, too, graceful and gay as the chairs, and a fire-screen of fine needlework.
"You hate anything that isn't three or four hundred years old," she said. "It's dreadful that our tastes don't agree, isn't it? Don't you think we ought to part at once? 'They separated on account of incompatibility of furniture.'"
"But don't you like the things we have been getting?"