“Brian,” she said, clinging lovingly to his arm, “I suppose nothing would induce you to live in the Pavilion.”
He made a wry face. “I’ll come if my wife refuses to live in any other place.”
“Your wife will do as you wish,” said Stargarde.
“You sweet creature, and blessed man that I am!” and with a final embrace he left her.
Stargarde spent as usual a busy day, and at six o’clock sat down to a brief and lively repast that Vivienne and Judy came in to share with her. After the tea things had been put away, she invited them to go with her to a large room used for general assembly purposes by the tenants of the Pavilion and called the kitchen.
The two girls gladly accompanied her, for the cheering and consoling of the different members of Stargarde’s enormous family had become their chief occupation. They walked along to the large apartment, glancing across as they did so to the bathroom, washhouses, and co-operative baking establishment, in the courtyard, with the working of which they had become quite familiar.
“Isn’t this jolly!” exclaimed Judy when the kitchen door was pushed open.
At one side of the extensive and irregularly shaped room, heaped-up logs blazed in a vast cavern of a fireplace. No other light was needed. The floor was a painted one, and the furniture consisted of a number of plain wooden rocking-chairs for children and grown people, a few small tables, and a piano situated in a dusky corner.
At this piano a red-coated soldier was seated, singing amorously, “I’m so ’appy; so terrible ’appy,” to a maiden hovering sentimentally over him. Some children sprawling on the floor were tossing jackstones, and two gray-haired men at a table were intent on draughts.
An old woman, known as “granny,” sat knitting by the fire. There was alway a granny in the Pavilion, for when one died Stargarde immediately got another, saying that the spectacle of an aged person among young ones, beloved and waited on by all, was one of the most humanizing experiments she had ever tried.