She called it Granville.
The name, in large white letters, appeared presently in the fanlight above the door.
At Woolridge's, on Monday morning in his dinner-hour, Mr. Ransome of the counting-house strolled with great dignity and honor through seven distinct departments as a customer. He ear-marked, for a beginning, and subject always to the approval of a Lady, three distinct suites of furniture which he proposed, most certainly, to purchase outright. None of your hire-purchase systems for Mr. Ransome.
On Tuesday, accompanied by two ladies, he again appeared. Between two violent blushes, and with an air which would have been light and offhand if it could, Mr. Ransome presented to his friend, the foreman, his mother—and Miss Usher. And as if the foreman had not sufficiently divined her, Miss Usher's averted shoulders, burning cheeks, and lowered eyelids made it impossible for him to forget that she was the Lady whose approval was the ultimate condition of the deal.
After an immensity of time, in which Mr. Ransome's dinner hour was swallowed up and lost, Miss Usher decided finally on the suite in stained walnut, upholstered handsomely in plush, with a pattern which Ransome imagined to be Oriental, a pattern of indefinite design in a yellowish drab and heavy blue upon a ground of crimson. A splendid suite. The overmantle alone was worth the nineteen pounds nineteen shillings he paid for it.
The furnishing of the chamber of the love knots was arranged for, decorously, between Mrs. Ransome and the foreman. Over every item, from the wardrobe in honey-colored maple picked out with black, to the china "set" with crimson reeds and warblers on it, Ranny's friend, the foreman, communed with Ranny's mother in an intimate aside; and Ranny's mother, in another aside of even more accentuated propriety, appealed to flaming cheeks and lowered eyelids and a mouth that gave an almost inarticulate assent. The eyelids refused to open on Ranny where he stood, turning his back on the women, while he shook dubiously the footrail of the iron double bedstead to test the joints; and the mouth refused to speak when Ranny was heard complaining that the bedstead was about three sizes too large for the room. Eyes and mouth recovered only downstairs among the carpets, where they again asserted themselves by insisting on a Kidderminster with a slender pattern of blue on a drab ground; though Ranny's mother had advised the black and crimson. Ranny's mother contended almost with passion that drab showed every stain. But Violet would have that carpet and no other.
And when by struggles and by prodigies of strength on Ranny's part, and on the part of Woolridge's men, by every kind of physical persuasion, and by coaxing, by strategy and guile, all that furniture from seven distinct departments was at last squeezed into Granville—well, there was hardly room to turn round. Granville, that would have held its own under any treatment less severe, was overpowered by Woolridge's.
"What's wrong with it?" said poor Ranny, as they stood together one Saturday evening and surveyed their front sitting-room. He couldn't see anything wrong with it himself.