“I am afraid,” she said shyly, “that I shall turn out a bitter disappointment. You can’t know much about girls, Mrs. Dale, or you would feel, as they all do at home, that there is a time, which I am going through now, when a girl is just as awkward and as stupid and as generally undesirable as she can possibly be.”
“Hush, hush, child! You don’t know anything about it. Don’t you know that girls are charming, and that part of their charm lies in that very belief that they are ‘all wrong,’ when as a matter of fact they are everything that is right?”
“Ah! You were never gawky and awkward!”
“I wasn’t tall enough to be gawky, as you like to call yourself. But five years ago, when I was eighteen, I was just as miserable as you try to make yourself, believing myself to be in everybody’s way. It led to awful consequences in my case,” added Mrs. Dale, the excitement going quite suddenly out of her face and voice, and giving place to a look and tone of dull despair. Mabin, who had been made to take off her hat, put her hand in that of the little widow.
“Come and see if you like your room,” said Mrs. Dale, springing quickly toward the door, with a rapid change of manner. “I must tell you frankly I am afraid you won’t, because this place has been constructed haphazard, without any regard to the comfort or convenience of the unfortunate people who have to live in it. Every fireplace is so placed that the chimney must smoke whichever way the wind is, and every window is specially adapted to let in the rain, when there is any, and the wind, when there isn’t.”
Mrs. Dale led the way as she spoke from the dining-room, and Mabin followed.
Mrs. Dale certainly exaggerated the defects of the house, but that it was inconvenient could not be denied. The side nearest to the road, where the dining-room was, had once been the whole house. It had a basement, and out of the warren of small rooms of which it had once consisted, a fairly large hall and a few fair-sized rooms had been made.
The newer but not very new portion of the house had no basement, and it was by a short flight of steps that you descended from the hall into the drawing-room, and by another short flight that you ascended to the bedroom floor. Here the same irregularity was apparent. A corridor ran through the house from end to end on this floor, broken where the new part joined the old by half a dozen steep steps.
It was to a bedroom on the higher level at the old end of the house that Mrs. Dale conducted Mabin.
“Why, it’s a lovely room!” cried the girl, surprised to find herself in a big, low-ceilinged corner room lighted by three windows, and looking out, on one side, to the road, with a view of fields and sea beyond, and on the other to the garden at the back of the house, where apple-trees and gooseberry-bushes and the homely potato occupied the chief space, while the nooks were filled with the fragrant flowers of cottage gardens, with sweet-william and sweet-pea, mignonette and wallflower.