None the less, although I was amused and a little irritated, I must confess to the dawnings of dubiety as to the perfect wisdom of leaving such a little paradise. If it had all this allurement was I being sensible to let others have it, and at a time when houses are so scarce and everything is so costly? Had I not perhaps been wrong in my estimate? Was not the sanguine agent the true judge?
I read on and realised that he was not. "One mile from Blank station." Such a statement is one not of critical appraisement but of fact or falsity. The accent in which he had said, "Yes, two and a-half miles from the station," was distinct in my ear.
I read further. "Lighted by gas;" and again I recalled that intelligent young fellow's bright "Yes, gas only in the garden-room."
What is one to do with these poets, these roseate optimists? And how delightful to be one of them and refuse to see any but desirable residences and gas where none is!
But it was the next trope that really shook me: "Well-stocked kitchen-garden." Here I ceased to be amused and became genuinely angry. The idea of calling that wilderness, that monument of neglect, "well-stocked." I was furious.
That was a week ago. Yesterday I paid a flying visit to the country to see how things were going and how many people had been to view the place; and my fury increased when, after again and for the fiftieth time pointing out to the gardener the lack of this and that vegetable, he was more than normally smiling and silent and dense and impenitent.
"You say here," he said at last, pulling the description of the house from his pocket and pointing to the words with a thumb as massive as it is dingy and as dingy as it is massive—"you say here 'well-stocked kitchen garden.'" You!
And now I understand better the phrases "agents for good" and "agents for evil."
