The cottage was a delightful place. It was built of weatherboard, not the kind that overlaps, but that with a groove between each board. The verandah was very wide and ran round the four sides; that was Larrie’s great extravagance when he improved the place.
‘Where’s a fellow to smoke when it’s hot or wet if there isn’t a decent verandah?’ he said.
He and Dot had walked miles upon it in the early months of the year, he with his pipe in his lips and a look of great content in his eyes, she with her hands linked at the back of her neck or slipped around his arm.
[p 22]
]There was a profusion of hammocks and lounges and chairs that made you lazy to look at them. That was Dot’s extravagance. On one side the outer wall was of yellow and white roses that flowered eternally, on another, wistaria with delicate down-dropping blooms. The third—the kitchen side—was passion-vines, and the fourth was clear, and showed a grand sweep of country, and all the Sydney vista.
There was a narrow hall and a painted front door, on either side of it long French windows opening, one into the dining-room, the other into Dot’s beautiful little drawing-room.
She had spent a week thinking out the furnishing of that room, and nearly all her mother’s wedding-present cheque upon it.
‘No, I won’t have a carpet,’ she said when her mother was dwelling upon the advantages of Brussels over Wilton pile, ‘and no, I won’t have felt, it’s too stuffy looking; and if you buy me a proper tapestry suite I shall set fire to it. In India people furnish sensibly, [p 23] ]but in Australia, which must be nearly as hot, they do everything in English style.’
The little mother ceased her suggestions, and Dot worked her own will with really charming effect.
The room was rather low, and the walls and ceiling tinted a delicate green. There was a large centre square of white matting, fringed at the edge and a border of pale green around it. The three French windows had long soft curtains of white with pale green frills. No two chairs were alike. They were of rattan and pith, and bamboo in quaint shapes. One had a flat sea-green cushion of plush, one a triangular one of silk with frills of coral pink; there was a lovely pith sofa lounge, wide, inviting, with a pile of pillows in cool Liberty silk. In a corner the piano stood, a beautiful instrument though very plain. It was not draped in art muslin, and it had no photos or bric-à-brac on it to jingle and spoil the wonderful music Dot brought forth from it. A great lamp stood beside it with a green crinkled paper canopy, restful to the eye.
[p 24]
]In another corner there was a low bookcase running along the wall; volumes of Browning caught the eye, Tennyson, William Morris, Shelley, Keats, all the gods.