"Of course I do, but I like these, too. They're like lavender and pot-pourri, and ladies who had still-rooms and made scents and liqueurs and confections in them, and walked in their gardens in high-heeled shoes and peach-blossom petticoats."
"Why not buy them, then?"
"I would if I had a house. If I were buying things I should first buy everything I liked, and not try to keep to any particular period. I believe the things would all settle down and be happy together if you loved them all. Did you get your precious dresser? And are you going to buy that Lowestoft dessert-service to go on it?"
He bought the Lowestoft dessert-service, beautiful with red, red roses and golden tracery; and next day he got up early and went around and bought all the painted mother-of-pearly things that she had touched. He gave the man an address in Sussex to which to send everything, and he wrote a long letter to his old nurse, whose address it was that he had given.
They had had dinner in the little private sitting-room over the front door, the smallest private room, I believe, that ever took an even semi-public part in the life of a hotel. It was quite full of curly glass vases and photographs in frames of silver and of plush, till Edward persuaded the landlady to remove them, "for fear," as he said, "we should have an accident and break any of them."
They breakfasted here, and here, too, luncheon was served, so that they met none of the other guests at meals, and in their in-goings and out-comings they only met strangers. Mr. Schultz might still have been at Tunbridge Wells, for any sense they had of him.
Presently and inevitably came the afternoon when they motored to Kenilworth.
"I've always wanted to see Kenilworth," she told him, "almost more than any place. Kenilworth and the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Lost City in India—you know the one that the very name of it is forgotten, and they just found it by accident, all alone and beautiful, with panthers in it instead of people, and trees growing out of the roofs of the palaces, like Kipling's Cold Lairs."
"I get a sort of cold comfort from the thought of that city," he said. "That and Babylon and Nineveh and the great cities in Egypt. When I go through Manchester or New Cross or Sheffield I think, 'Some day grass and trees will cover up all this ugliness and flowers will grow again in the Old Kent Road.'"