The Notched Hairpin Read Online Free Page B

delay us from getting out of the small and rather stuffy quarters in which we’d cooped ourselves up in London to be in this—to quote somebody I’ve forgotten—“larger, serener air.” For as our attendant fell in behind us as we mounted the steps, the door opened. A most efficient maid stood by it—I could see at a glance, for I am a judge of maids. And my judgment was confirmed with every step we took over the threshold: the brass was like gold; the mahogany like tortoise shell; the pieces of silver bright as mercury; not a speck of dust anywhere, still less the thread of a spider; the chintzes lately calendered, bright-stiff but not repellent.
    As we passed through from the hall to the dining room, even Mr. M. was impressed and had the courtesy to say, “What a lovely polish all the woodwork has.” The maid bridled with pleasure; and then, not content with having given pleasure, he must overload the whole thing and begin taking that rather absurd overinterest. He bent and looked at the grand piano we were passing.
    â€œYou use one of the new waxes, don’t you?”
    â€œOh, yes, Sir! Sheen is just wonderful!”
    â€œNone of the old oils and resins now!”
    â€œOh, no, Sir, they was ever so much trouble, and when you’d done all your best, there they were, and never could you be sure whether the gloss would last; I’d never go back to those old things, would never let them in the house again, never!”
    He had, as usual, when casually and by habit of fidget picking at the dike of some special and really boring interest, unloosed a flow of utterly irrelevant technicalities. He gave no further encouragement, but it was too late—the technician had tasted blood, or rather resin or wax or whatever it was that whetted her appetite and loosed her tongue. She followed the three of us as we moved through the dining room to a stately, tall window at the end that opened out to another short flight of steps leading into the garden. We went down these, I supposed to get a general view of the house from the back.
    The garden was as charming as the house. It was of the period and as unspoiled. There were pleached alleys of beech just coming into leaf, these, with their light green, framed against a solid background of close-clipped yew, and behind that again, closing in the whole, a fine, tall brick wall and some most promising peach trees covered with bloom. At the end I thought I saw a fish pond with a statue or two, while on the right this lovely enclosure had the only outer entrance, a fine green door, serenely shut.
    I was still at the top of the steps surveying this, which I already saw as my privy garden for the summer, when I noticed that Mr. M., the man he would call the house investigator, and the maid, still hoping to impart further technical tips on the polishing of furniture, had paused at the foot. There the pleached alleys met and made a kind of arbor. They went into this little bower, and I followed. It certainly was charming inside, and I became even more deeply rooted—for here, clearly, was the actual spot where I would sit, working at that very suggestive essay on “1760 as the Acme of English Taste.” The place was made for such work, for in the little enclosed bay which it formed, screened from the house, screened from almost all the garden, was a sort of sanctum sanctorum fitted as a kind of shrine. I felt the owner must have used it thus, for there was a beautiful stone chair carved in lovely half-marble Hopton Wood stone that time and a small bloom of lichens had deepened, so that it was more like moss agate. This noble seat was flanked on both sides by two stone tables of the same material, and looking down on each side were marble busts, now too gone a decent duck-egg green, of two Greek worthies. I felt in my bones that I had arrived. Here was a spot so manifestly prepared that, as little as a bird can fail to lay an egg in a