"Well," I said, "I think it's a blackguard one."
"Oh, sir!" he replied. "Live and let live."
"It's funny, all the same," I added, "that I should have run across you, because I've been looking for a house for some time, and the only one I liked was occupied."
He pulled out a pocket-book. "Yes?" he said, moistening his pencil.
But that is enough of him.
So much for my first way, which, as I happen to know, has succeeded, at any rate once. Now for the other, which is less material. In fact, some people might call it supernatural.
I was telling a lady about my friend the unsettler and his methods; but she did not seem to be in the least impressed.
"All very well," she said; "but there's a more efficient and more respectable way than that. And," she added, with a significant glance at her husband and not without triumph, "I happen to know."
She sat at the dinner-table in the old farm-house—"modernized," as the agents have it, "yet redolent of old-world charm." By modernized they mean that the rightful occupiers—the simple agriculturists—had gone for ever, and well-to-do artistic Londoners had made certain changes to fit it for a week-end retreat. In other words, it had become a pied-à-terre. Where the country folk for whom all these and smaller cottages were built now live, who shall say? Probably in mean streets; anyway, not here. The exterior remains often the same, but inside, instead of the plain furniture of the peasantry, one finds wicker arm-chairs and sofa-chairs, all the right books and weekly papers, and cigarettes.
This particular farm-house was charming. An ingle-nook, Heal furniture, old-pattern cretonnes and chintzes, an etching or two, a Japanese print or two, a reproduction of a John, the poems of Mr. Masefield and Rupert Brooke, a French novel, the New Statesman, and where once had been a gun-rack a Della Robbia Madonna.