“I’m sure it is,” said the tall lady, and put aside her great fur coat from her lithe, slender, red-clad body. (She was permitted by a sudden civility of Clarence’s to descend.) “Why! the windows,” she said, pausing on the step, “are like crystal.”
“These very ’ands,” said the little old woman, and glanced up at the windows the lady had praised. The little old woman’s initial sternness wrinkled and softened as the skin of a windfall does after a day or so upon the ground. She half turned in the doorway and made a sudden vergerlike gesture. “We enter,” she said, “by the ’all.... Them’s Mr. Brumley’s ’ats and sticks. Every ’at or cap ’as a stick, and every stick ’as a ’at or cap, and on the ’all table is the gloves corresponding. On the right is the door leading to the kitching, on the left is the large droring-room which Mr. Brumley ’as took as ’is study.” Her voice fell to lowlier things. “The other door beyond is a small lavatory ’aving a basing for washing ’ands.”
“It’s a perfectly delightful hall,” said the lady. “So low and wide-looking. And everything so bright—and lovely. Those long, Italian pictures! And how charming that broad outlook upon the garden beyond!”
“You’ll think it charminger when you see the garding,” said the little old woman. “It was Mrs. Brumley’s especial delight. Much of it—with ’er own ’ands.”
“We now enter the droring-room,” she proceeded, and flinging open the door to the right was received with an indistinct cry suggestive of the words, “Oh, damn it!” The stout medium-sized gentleman in an artistic green-grey Norfolk suit, from whom the cry proceeded, was kneeling on the floor close to the wide-open window, and he was engaged in lacing up a boot. He had a round, ruddy, rather handsome, amiable face with a sort of bang of brown hair coming over one temple, and a large silk bow under his chin and a little towards one ear, such as artists and artistic men of letters affect. His profile was regular and fine, his eyes expressive, his mouth, a very passable mouth. His features expressed at first only the naïve horror of a shy man unveiled.
Intelligent appreciation supervened.
There was a crowded moment of rapid mutual inspection. The lady’s attitude was that of the enthusiastic house-explorer arrested in full flight, falling swiftly towards apology and retreat. (It was a frightfully attractive room, too, full of the brightest colour, and with a big white cast of a statue—a Venus!—in the window.) She backed over the threshold again.
“I thought you was out by that window, sir,” said the little old woman intimately, and was nearly shutting the door between them and all the beginnings of this story.
But the voice of the gentleman arrested and wedged open the closing door.
“I——Are you looking at the house?” he said. “I say! Just a moment, Mrs. Rabbit.”