"Because it hasn't had justice done to it."
"I should have thought that was a ground for pity rather than resentment."
Mrs. Fazakerly shrugged her shoulders ever so little. "That drawing-room—did you ever see anything like it? And such possibilities in it, too. I can't bear to think of all those beautiful things wasted, just for want of a little taste, a little arrangement—the right touch."
The widow's white fingers twitched. It was not vulgar cupidity; it was the passion of the born genius, of the lover of art for art's sake, who sees his opportunity given into the hands of an inferior. If only she had the ordering, the decoration of Coton Manor! Durant thought of the cottage at the gates, her cramped and humble sphere; it was not her fault so much as the defect of her instrument, that forcing of the note of taste; no wonder that she longed for the rich harmonies of Coton Manor under "the right touch," the touch of the master.
She continued, "But poor dear Miss Tancred, you know, she will have it left just as it was in Mrs. Tancred's time; she won't change a picture or a chair in it. That's Frida all over. She's made that house a monument to her mother's memory. And think what she might have made it."
"I'm thinking what she might have made of her life. She seems to be making that a monument to her father's memory."
"Ah! and the things she could have done with it."
Impossible to say whether Mrs. Fazakerly referred to Miss Tancred's house or her life. Durant smiled at her probable conception of Coton Manor, with its tragedy of splendid possibilities gone to waste; but Mrs. Fazakerly's idea cut both ways.
She sighed wearily.
"These drives were not made to be walked up. There's another mile and a half of it, and I'm half-dead already. I shall sit down."