“Dear me,” she exclaimed, stopping short and raising the gold double eye-glass she carried, as a beautiful porcelain vase caught her eye. “Why, that must be Dresden, old Dresden. Your master has very excellent taste. There are some beautiful things here. It’s quite a museum!”
She spoke in a patronising manner to the maid, glad of an opportunity to show what a very superior person she was. For a taste for old china does not come by nature.
But the housemaid was a superior person also.
“Oh, yes,” she answered with surprise. “Don’t you know that Mr. Bradfield’s collection is famous, and that people write and ask him to see it, quite as if he was royalty! We’ve had a Duke here, looking at those very things, and wishing they were his, and saying so!”
And the maid smiled with a sense of her own share in the glory that the Duke’s visit had cast upon the establishment.
They went the whole length of the corridor, and were shown into a bedroom on the right, the window of which looked inland. It was rather a small room, this fact being emphasised by the quantity of handsome and costly furniture with which it was filled. Before a carved white stone fireplace, fitted with pretty tiles, another housemaid was kneeling. She started up when the ladies came in.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” said she; “the fire will draw up directly, and the room will soon be warm. It was only ten minutes ago master told me you were to have this room, instead of the one in the wing.”
Chris caught a frown from the other housemaid, intimating that this information was not wanted. Then the second housemaid having said she would bring them some hot water, the ladies were left to themselves.
Chris, tired as she was, spent the next ten minutes alternately in an ecstacy of high spirits, and a fit of deep depression; the former the result of her delight in her surroundings, the latter the effect of her belief that she would soon have to leave them.
“I wonder why he ordered our room to be changed?” she whispered to her mother, as she admired in turn the handsome brass bedstead, with its spread of silk and lace, the rosewood furniture, the little lady’s writing-table, the cosy sofa and easy-chair. “Have we been sent up or sent down? If we have been sent up, the bedroom in the wing must have been gorgeous indeed. Mother, this bed is too magnificent to sleep in; and as for the so-called dressing-room next door,” and she peeped through a door which communicated with a second and rather smaller room, “it is a cross between a museum and a palatial boudoir.”