“‘Good-day to yer,’ he grumbled, and walked back in the direction from which he had come. I watched until he was lost in the thickness.”
Julia looked at Hastings in astonishment. Just another glimmer of anxiety crossed her mind; but any foolish worry she might have had for him was merged in her consciousness of something indeed more staggering.
“Do you think,” she brooded, “that it can be true—that—that the house is—was—haunted?”
“I had,” Jack unresponsively continued—“I couldn’t help it—on the way a queer loathing of the little village. The gaunt house-fronts obtruded themselves so obstinately, so self-satisfiedly, like anemic country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean, soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed pitiless; their narrowness was oppressive.”
“I love every inch of it,” said Julia, defiantly.
Hastings was silent. He looked at the dry, colorless walls, covered with circuitous lines of crackling old paint.
“Was this furniture here, Julia?” he asked.
“Not this,” she exclaimed with pride.
“No wonder,” he argued half to himself, “that the next generation preferred black walnut, even with all its grapes and gewgaws! Horrible as it was, it wasn’t so orthodox and priggish and mirthless as what came before.”
He strayed out into the hall again; he viewed its stateliness, its expurgated elegance. “Well, this has got me, Julia—seriously,” he said with a surprised realization that she was standing beside him. “It’s—it’s immense.”