Mr. Vanborough looked across the table, as ungraciously as possible, at his wife.
“What have you to do with it?” he asked.
Mrs. Vanborough tried to clear the conjugal horizon b y a smile.
“My dear John,” she said, gently, “you forget that, while you are at business, I am here all day. I can’t help seeing the people who come to look at the house. Such people!” she continued, turning to Mr. Kendrew. “They distrust every thing, from the scraper at the door to the chimneys on the roof. They force their way in at all hours. They ask all sorts of impudent questions—and they show you plainly that they don’t mean to believe your answers, before you have time to make them. Some wretch of a woman says, ‘Do you think the drains are right?’—and sniffs suspiciously, before I can say Yes. Some brute of a man asks, ‘Are you quite sure this house is solidly built, ma’am?’—and jumps on the floor at the full stretch of his legs, without waiting for me to reply. Nobody believes in our gravel soil and our south aspect. Nobody wants any of our improvements. The moment they hear of John’s Artesian well, they look as if they never drank water. And, if they happen to pass my poultry-yard, they instantly lose all appreciation of the merits of a fresh egg!”
Mr. Kendrew laughed. “I have been through it all in my time,” he said. “The people who want to take a house are the born enemies of the people who want to let a house. Odd—isn’t it, Vanborough?”
Mr. Vanborough’s sullen humor resisted his friend as obstinately as it had resisted his wife.
“I dare say,” he answered. “I wasn’t listening.”
This time the tone was almost brutal. Mrs. Vanborough looked at her husband with unconcealed surprise and distress.
“John!” she said. “What can be the matter with you? Are you in pain?”
“A man may be anxious and worried, I suppose, without being actually in pain.”