To-day it was of her first five years at Fairholme Court that she was thinking.
She remembered driving up to the house that was now her home.
She remembered walking through the hall into the drawing-room, distressfully conscious, even through her shyness, of the desecrated stateliness of a dwelling meant for beauty.
True, she would not in those days have known with what to replace the gaudy Axminster carpet in the hall, nor the arsenic green curtains at the drawing-room windows. But little as she had seen, little as she then knew of material loveliness, the right instinct she possessed for form and colour was outraged at every turn by the indications at once trivial and ponderous of Mid-Victorian taste.
As she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Burbage rose from the sofa on which she had been lying, a woollen rug of rainbow hues thrown across her feet.
She was a little old woman with grey, corkscrew curls hanging in bunches over her ears, keen eyes, and a mouth which combined shrewdness and suspicion.
She looked Anne up and down with a penetrating glance.
“I didn’t think you would have grown so tall,” she remarked. “You were a little creature when I last saw you. Ring for tea, my dear, and then I dare say you would like to go to your room. Parker will show you. Make yourself at home, and amuse yourself in your own way, if you can find anything to do in this dull place. I don’t want you to think you need trouble about running after me, unless I ask for you. I hate fuss. There will be time enough for that when I get worse.”
The words struck the keynote of the future relationship between the two women.
Even at that time Anne’s benefactress was a semi-invalid who did not rise till noon, and usually spent the rest of the day on the sofa, knitting interminably. Her illness, not at first severe, made any but the slightest attention unnecessary. She was a woman a little eccentric, often difficult in temper, but never exacting in trifles.