CHAPTER IX.
Mrs. Fielden's motor car is still a matter of absorbing interest to the inhabitants of Stowel. When it breaks down, as it frequently does, there is always a crowd round it immediately. Our friends and neighbours in the town have an ingenuous respect for anything that costs a great deal of money, and they are quite congratulatory to any one who has been for a drive with Mrs. Fielden, and they talk about the motor and its owner, and who has seen it, and who has not, over their afternoon tea.
The motor car is a noisy, evil-smelling vehicle of somewhat rowdy appearance, which leaves a trail behind it as of a smoking lamp. It drew up at our door to-day, and kicked and snorted impatiently until we were ready to get into it. The next moment, with a final angry snort and plunge, it started down the drive and whizzed through the village and up the hill on the other side without pausing to take breath.
"The worst of a motor car is," said Mrs. Fielden, "that one gets through everything so quickly. In London I get my shopping done in about a quarter of an hour, and then I take a turn round Regent's Park, and I find I have put away about ten minutes, so I fly down to Richmond, and even then it is too early to go to tea anywhere. Talking of tea—isn't everybody very hungry? I am really ravenous—and that is the motor car's fault, too. Because one has learned to want one's meals by the amount of business one has got through, and when one has done a whole afternoon's work in three-quarters of an hour, one is dying for tea, just as if it were five o'clock."
"I have always been ravenous since I was in South Africa," said one of Mrs. Fielden's colonels, who had driven over in the motor car to take care of her and to bring us back. "I don't know when I shall satisfy the pangs of hunger which I acquired on the veldt."
"I think I shall call on Mr. Ellicomb," said Mrs. Fielden. "I believe he has excellent afternoon teas, and he is making me an enamel box which I should like to see."
Ellicomb said once or twice, as we sat in his picturesque house with its blue china and old brass work, that he only wished we had given him warning that we were coming. We found him with an apron on, working at his enamels; and when he had displayed this work to us, he showed us his bookbinding, and his fretwork-carving, and his type-writing machine. Afterwards we had tea, which Ellicomb poured very deftly into his blue cups, having first warmed the teapot and the cups, and flicked away one or two imaginary specks of dirt from the plates with what appeared to be a small lace-trimmed dinner-napkin.
Mrs. Fielden began to admire his majolica ware, of which she knows nothing whatever, and Ellicomb took her for a tour round his rooms, and asked her to guess the original uses of his drain-tiles and spittoons and copper ham-pots. Afterwards we were taken into a very small conservatory adjoining his house, where every plant was displayed to us in turn; and we were subsequently shown his coal-cellar and his larder and his ash-pit before we were allowed to return to the house.
Ellicomb smiles more often than any other man I know, and he had only one epithet to apply to his house. "It's so cosy," he said. "Isn't it cosy?" "I do think it's a cosy little place."