“And painting.”
He tried to sparkle appreciatively. “Well, it takes time to do those things. You never know what you’re in for. She’s well?”
And he swayed back and forth on his heels, and teetered his head nervously. Poor thing! The gap he had tried so hard to bridge was filled to brimming now by the promised advent of Hurrell Oaks.
Miss Haviland called me on the telephone one afternoon as the day was approaching to ask if I would lend her my samovar; and she wanted I should bring it over presently, if possible, as she was slowly getting things right, and didn’t like to leave any more than was necessary to the last moment. So I polished the copper up as best I could and went ’round that evening to the New Gainsborough to leave it.
The building looked very dismal to me, I recall. A forlorn place it seemed to receive the great guest. It had been a dormitory once, which had been given over, owing to the inconveniences of the location, to accommodate unmarried teachers. It was more like a refined factory than an apartment-house. The high stoop had no railing, and the pebbles which collected on the coarse granite steps added to the general bleakness of the entrance. The inner halls were grim, with plain match-board wainscots and dingy paint, and narrow staircases that ascended steeply from meager landings. Miss Haviland’s suite was three flights up.
But when I got inside it, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Her door was slightly ajar—it was the way Miss Haviland avoided the bother and the squalor of having to let people in—and at my knock she called out in a restrained, serene tone, “Come!” And I stepped through the tiny vestibule into the study.
It was amazingly attractive—Hurrell Oaks himself would have remarked it, I’ll wager. Nobody except Marian Haviland could have wrought such a change.
Of course there were Mrs. Edgerton’s Monet, and Mrs. Braxton’s brocades, and—yes—Mrs. Green’s fur rug, to say nothing of numberless other borrowed objets, to help out the lavishness of the effect; but the synthesis was magnificent. Everything looked as if it had grown there. One might have been in an Italian palace. And Miss Haviland, seated at her new antique walnut desk with the ormolu mounts, looked veritably like a chatelaine. She had always, too—I ought to have seen it before—a little resembled a chatelaine, a chatelaine without a castle.
But she had for the moment her castle now—enough of it to complete the picture, at any rate. There was a low smoldering fire on the hearth, and the breeze that played through the open window just swayed the heavy damask hangings rhythmically. My samovar, as I set it down on a carved consol near the door, looked too crude and crass to warrant the excuse of my coming.