“What was there to hope for now? Nothing! What was there to do now? Nothing! Nothing but sit at the window and gaze at the dreary lawn, shut off from the road by a hideous wall, or to flit about from room to room wringing one’s hands like a distracted phantom.
“A phantom! I did not believe in phantoms when I came to Thurlow; I treated the Unknown with the blind levity of a Voltaire; I was inconsequently sceptical; I had been born psychic.
“Though I was sublimely unconscious of it, the dawn of my awakening was at hand.
“Though the house was undesirable in so many ways—cold, bare, comfortless, dilapidated—it was not without interest. It was old—old with the antiquity of two or more centuries—and age is always interesting.
“There were rooms in it, narrow, rectangular rooms darkened by Virginian creeper that dropped their crimson foliage over diamond panes, rooms the very air of which seemed charged with the shades of old-world wits and savants.
“In my imagination the house had once been a school: the severity of the walls, the coldness of their neat yellow stones suggested it; I even went so far as to fancy I could discern ink-stains on the skirting-boards; and who but schoolboys ever desecrate a floor with ink-stains?
“The predominating feature in the house was undoubtedly the staircase.
“It was the first thing one noticed on entering; there was no escaping it. Confronting the door in the very middle of the hall, it stood there like some grey and massive sentinel—and barred the way. One wondered how it had ever got there, it was so disproportionately large for the house. It was masterful, aggressive, FASCINATING (Marie declared ‘there was no getting away from it—that it LIVED’)—and—it was made of STONE. There was no doubt about it now ‘The Hall’ had indeed been a school; would any one but a pedagogue have a stone staircase? Eugh! my mother felt a twinge of rheumatism the moment she set eyes on it.
“It was curiously wanting in proportion; consisting of barely a dozen steps, it was most uncomfortably steep and of a most unnecessary width. I compared it with some strange, squatting animal—a comparison that grew on me the longer I remained in the house.
“At the top of the staircase was a gallery, protected by high rails, which I discovered connected the used and disused portions of the house. In the latter there were some rooms we did not care to inhabit; there were a few we were even unable to explore—they were locked.