"You've been down on the Point before now, I suppose," she said as they rolled smoothly along the Avenue.
"Yes, once I did. Cousin Kate took me with her one day to call on a friend of hers, Miss Gisborne."
"Oh, yes, that queer old maid. I know they're very intimate, though I confess I never could see what Mrs. Gray finds in her to like. She's so eccentric, and so different from other people, and she wears such extraordinary clothes."
"But she's very nice, and she tells the funniest stories, and her house is ever so pretty," said Candace, rather at a loss to know what she ought to say.
"Ah, indeed, is it? Inside, you mean. I don't think it amounts to much outside, though people who have a mania for old houses rave about it, I believe. I'm afraid I'm dreadfully modern in my tastes. I can't, for the life of me, see any beauty in ceilings so low that you bump your head against them, and little scraps of windows filled with greenish glass that you can't see through, and which make you look like a mouldy fright, if any one looks through from the outside."
"Miss Gisborne's window-panes are green," admitted Candace. "Some of them are so old that they have colors all over them like mother-of-pearl,—red and blue and yellow. I liked to see them; and she told us that last summer an architect who was going by the house stopped and looked at them a long time, and then rang the bell and offered to give her new sashes with great big panes in them if she would exchange; but she wouldn't."
"The more fool she!" rejoined Mrs. Joy, frankly. "My! what a splendid big house that is going to be! That's the kind of thing I like." And she pointed to an enormous half-finished structure of wood, painted pumpkin color and vermilion, which with its size, its cottage-like details, and the many high thin chimneys which rose above its towering roofs, looked a happy mixture of an asylum, a factory, and a Swiss châlet.
"But what a little bit of ground there is about it for such a big house!" said Candace, whose country eyes were often struck by the disproportion between the Newport edifices and the land on which they stood.
"Yes; land is so dreadfully dear now that people can't afford large places."
"I wonder why this is called 'Farewell Street,'" said Candace, looking at the name painted on the corner of a street into which they were turning.