“I am afraid you will conclude we are rather hard to please: perhaps we are somewhat exacting, but we cannot help it; we are women of the old school, may I add, of gentle birth, who claim to the full all the privileges of our sex and station; besides we offered a good sum for the house: we expected to be treated fairly.
“According to the advertisement, ‘The Hall’ was furnished: it was, in reality, nothing of the sort. Can any house in which there is neither bookcase nor bathroom be said to be furnished? Though standing alone on a fairly large piece of ground—I cannot truthfully say a garden—it might well have been called semi-detached, for we searched in it in vain to find a whole piece of furniture.
“Marie and Eugenie are smart young women: they pride themselves on being slim and elegant. Imagine then their disgust when the kitchen chairs actually collapsed under them.
“I, too, had a grievance. Without conceit I may say that it is not in my nature to be clumsy. How was it then that I broke three cups, a saucer, and a cream-jug within the short space of half an hour? The reason was obvious enough! The cups were all cracked, the saucers damaged, and the jugs should have been labelled ‘beware of the handle.’ Even moderately disfigured china is my mother’s pet aversion. How she suffered under these circumstances I will not attempt to describe.
“But the plate! I have heard of gold plate, silver plate, copper plate, brass plate, and electro plate, but with none of these could I associate this mongrel species, these odds and ends we were called upon to use. It was, indeed, an enigma, and I hate enigmas, especially when they are not worth the trouble of solving. Luckily, substitutes were easily obtainable. I wired for a complete supply of plate from home, after which the motley crew of hirelings were no longer in evidence.
“And the carpets! I have always thought such luxuries, even the most costly, a doubtful blessing; these were undoubtedly an unmixed evil. Fortunately, we were able to dispense with them. The floors underneath were of polished oak, and with these we were greatly taken. True, we were somewhat puzzled to account for certain irregularities in the boards, but, on the whole, I think we should have been more astonished had we found them intact.
“Could we, by any means, make the place tenantable? Marie and Eugenie are brave and forgiving girls! In spite of their recent adventure—they had never been so insulted in their lives—they thought it possible; mother and I were doubtful.
“We hired all the furniture there was to be hired from the village, we engaged by the day the only prepossessing and respectable woman it contained, and we tried to settle down and pretend we enjoyed it. From the beginning it was a fiasco—we were miserable! and to add to our distress, or rather, to fill to overflowing our cup of misfortune, the weather became miserable, too; it began to rain.