“I know the house, like the inside of a glove,” he said, and indeed he did, for hadn’t I taken him all over it, the day he interviewed me instead of George, and there was a row? I think he is mischievous, rather like Puck was, in Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I thought I would stick to them. Lady Scilly wanted to go into an empty room to take off her mask and domino. That I could quite understand, as she had behaved so badly in both. The Bittern man offered to show her the way to George’s sanctum.
“You see, you can go where you like in a show-house—or ought to be able to. It is public property, the property of the press, at any rate.”
“The press is too much with us, soon and late,” said she, laughing.
“Ah, but confess, my lady, you can’t do without us!” said this awful young man—though I suppose he has to be cheeky, so as to get his nose in everywhere in the interest of his paper. “You suffer us gladly.”
“I don’t suffer at all—I shouldn’t allow you to make me suffer,” said she, not understanding him. Smart women never do understand things out of the Bible.
I followed them; my excuse was, that I wanted to see they didn’t steal the spoons. They made the coolest remarks as they went up-stairs.
“I have never been beyond the First Floor in this House of Awe,” said The Bittern man.
“Haven’t you? It seems to get more and more comfortable and less eccentric as one goes up,” said Lady Scilly.
“Art is only skin-deep,” said The Bittern man. “Just look at that bed, which seems to me to have come from nothing more dangerously subversive or artistic than Staple’s.... Come, lay down your mask and domino, and let us go down again, and wait about in the back precincts till we hear our host give the word for unmasking.”
So they marched out of George’s bedroom, for that was where they had got to—and as no one ever need see that, he has it quite comfortable, and modern—and sneaked down-stairs by a different way. I followed them. Soon they got quite lost and were heading straight for the kitchen. I wondered if Elizabeth had taken off her domino, and gone back to her work, for though the supper was all sent in from a shop, there would be sure to be something for her to do.