Phyl had a full measure of the Celtic power to meet trouble halfway, to imagine disaster. As she hurried home she saw all manner of trouble, things happening to Richard Pinckney, and all brought about through herself. Amidst all these fancies she saw one fact: He must be warned.
She found Miss Pinckney in the linen room. The linen room at Vernons was a treasure house beyond a man’s description, perhaps even beyond his true appreciation. There in the cupboards with their thin old fashioned ring handles and on the shelves of red cedar reposed damask and double damask of the time when men paid for their purchases in guineas, miraculous preservations. Just as the life of a china vase is a perpetual escape from the stupidity of servant maids and the heaviness of clumsy fingers, so the life of these cream white oblongs, in which certain lights brought forth miraculous representations of flowers, festoons and birds, was a perpetual preservation from the moth, from damp, from dryness, from the dust that corrupts.
A house like Vernons exists not by virtue of its brick and mortar; to keep it really alive it must be preserved in all its parts, not only from damp and decay, but from innovation; one can fancy a gas cooker sending a perpetual shudder through it, a telephone destroying who knows what fragrant old influences; the store cupboards and still room are part of its bowels, its napery, bed sheets, and hangings part of its dress. The man knew what he was doing who left Miss Pinckney a life interest in Vernons, it was that interest that kept Vernons alive.
She was exercising it on the critical examination of some sheets when Phyl came into the room, now, with the wool she had purchased and the tale she had to tell.
Miss Pinckney carefully put the sheet she was examining on one side, opened the parcel and looked at the wool.
“I met Silas Grangerson,” said Phyl as the other was examining the purchase with head turned on one side, holding it now in this light, now in that.
“Silas Grangerson! Why, where on earth has he sprung from?” asked Miss Pinckney in a voice of surprise.
“I don’t know, but I met him in the street and we walked as far as the Battery and—and—”
She hesitated for a moment, then it all came out. To no one but Maria Pinckney could she have told that story.
“Well, of all the astounding creatures,” said Miss Pinckney at last. “Did he ask you to marry him?”