“Look in the glass,” said Usk, and Félicia was mollified.
“I’m real glad I have the dollars, any way,” she said, slipping her hand into his arm. “This place wants making over from cellar to garret.”
“Does it? I suppose it seems so to other people, but it’s perfect to us. By the bye, Fay, you hurt old Wright’s feelings terribly the other day by depreciating his stables.”
“Why, I only said I’d have those old shacks pulled down, and a real elegant range of stabling built—just like at Bagatelle.”
“One may like good horses, and drive them too, without making palaces of their stables. Ours are all right.”
“Well, I’ll never be satisfied until they’re just as good as those at Bagatelle, with all sorts of cunning little notions around everywhere. Why, even Baron von Neuburg had heard of the Bagatelle stables, and we made an excursion over there for the day, so’s he might see them. But there’s just everything to be done to this house and the grounds. I’ve an idea of a glass piazza to close in that upper terrace, but the whole front of the house wants modernising real badly.”
Usk restrained himself with some difficulty. “Perhaps you don’t know that the Castle is considered one of the finest houses in the country?” he said. “It would be horribly out of character to try to make an American summer hotel out of it.”
“Well, I’d as lief have it that as a ruin,” said Félicia indifferently. “But it don’t even look old, only shabby. That’s what I would just admire, to add on towers and battlements, and all that, and make it a real castle.”
“A sham castle,” said Usk. “And I don’t think you would care to live in it.”
“Oh, I’d have plate-glass windows, and electricity everywhere, of course. And inside! Why, your mother has the rooms so bare, they feel to me ’most indecent. When I fix up the picture-gallery, you’ll see it’ll be just elegant. All those musty old pictures and horrid suits of armour and swords and things will take a back seat. Now you feel like looking at them because there’s nothing else to see, but when I’ve inaugurated my reforms, one of them will just be on hand here and there as a surprise.”