CHAPTER VIII.
DELICATE GROUND.
The two days at Robin Redbreast passed most satisfactorily, and long before they came to an end Jacinth felt completely at home. It would have been almost impossible for her or for any girl not to feel grateful for Lady Myrtle's extreme kindness, but besides this, everything in the life suited Jacinth's peculiar character. She liked the perfect order, the completeness of the arrangements, just as—in very different surroundings—she liked and appreciated the same qualities in her aunt's sphere. Mere luxury or display would not have pleased her in the same way, and except in the one matter of flowers and all expenses connected with her garden, Lady Myrtle lived simply. The house itself, though in perfectly good taste, was decidedly plain; the furniture belonged to a severe and unluxurious date. The colouring was harmonious, but unobtrusive.
But Jacinth thought it perfection. Her own room—the one which the old lady had specially chosen for her, and which she impressed upon her she must think of as appropriated to her—was exactly what she liked. The chintz hangings—pale pink rosebuds on a white ground—the quaint spindle-legged dressing-tables and chairs, the comfortably spacious but undecorated wardrobe of dark old mahogany, the three-cornered bookcases fitted in to the angles of the walls with their lozenge-paned glass doors—all was just as she liked.
'It's so beautifully neat,' she said to Lady Myrtle. 'I like a house to be almost primly neat. Frances says she's sure I shall be an old maid, and I daresay I shall be. I shouldn't mind, if I had a house of my own like this to live in.'
Lady Myrtle glanced at her with one of her peculiar but approving smiles.
'That is another point in common between us,' she said. 'I have always felt like you, and when—let me see, it must be fully twenty years ago now—when, for the first time I really was perfectly free to furnish a house to suit myself, you see I carried out my own ideas.'
'Oh, I thought Robin Redbreast was really old—furniture and all,' said Jacinth with a slight tone of disappointment.
'So it is,' said Lady Myrtle. 'A good deal of it was here in the house, and I had it done up—and some things I brought from Goodacre. My brother-in-law who succeeded there kindly let me choose out things of my favourite date. And they did not suit Goodacre, which is very grand and heavy, and, to my mind, ugly.'
'I know what you mean,' said Jacinth, eagerly—'enormous mirrors with huge gilt frames, and enormous gilt cornices over the window curtains, and great big patterns on the carpets. There was a house near Stannesley like that. It was interesting, something like an old palace, and grand; but I shouldn't like to live in a house of that kind.'