Estelle had once said that the room inspired her with a deep longing to throw stones there, so as to break some of the monotony.
Mrs Martin, her aunt, padded softly in each morning, moving pieces of furniture back to their exact places if they had been stirred by visitors, patting the muslin antimacassars, pausing every time at the doorway to remark, "Is it not a charming room?" and then padding out again—she wore velvet slippers—to sit in the room at the back and stitch for the poor. Mrs Martin had reduced dullness, skilfully touched up with worthiness, to a fine art.
She gave Estelle complete liberty, because, behind her conventional stupidity, she herself had a mind which imagined no harm, a child's mind, crystal clear of evil thoughts. She had married, been widowed, lived blamelessly. The swirl of London was part of the newspaper world, "which everyone knows, my dear, the compositors make up as they go on," she told Estelle, "except of course the divorce cases, and no doubt half of those are not true."
The most blameless daily which could be procured was taken together with the Athenæum and the Sunday Chronicle.
"Oh, I shall throw them some day," said Estelle aloud to the vases.
"Who is that, Magennis?" said Mrs Martin to the butler. "Captain Carteret! I trust he has come to arrange an outing for Miss Reynolds."
"He does that often, 'e does," said Magennis, as he went back to his pantry. Magennis had not a mind of crystal purity. When he was younger he had been pantry-boy in a large country house.
"Bertie! What is it?" Estelle dropped one of the smaller vases. It crashed on to the silver brightness of the polished fender, making a litter of bright-flowered glass and crackling everlastings.
"It's broken," said Estelle.
"And so am I." Bertie crossed the room and took her hands. "And you cannot ever mend the vase, Estelle, but I wonder if you can mend me."