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Page 28
Mrs. Wilkins noticed it too, but it only made her discursive
brain think of cuckoos. She would no doubt immediately have begun to
talk of cuckoos, incoherently, unrestrainably and deplorably, if she
had been in the condition of nerves and shyness she was in last time
she saw Mrs. Fisher. But happiness had done away with shyness--she was
very serene; she could control her conversation; she did not have,
horrified, to listen to herself saying things she had no idea of saying
when she began; she was quite at her ease, and completely natural. The
disappointment of not going to be able to prepare a welcome for Mrs.
Fisher had evaporated at once, for it was impossible to go on being
disappointed in heaven. Nor did she mind her behaving as hostess.
What did it matter? You did not mind things in heaven. She and Mrs.
Arbuthnot, therefore, sat down more willingly than they otherwise would
have done, one on either side of Mrs. Fisher, and the sun, pouring
through the two windows facing east across the bay, flooded the room,
and there was an open door leading into the garden, and the garden was
full of many lovely things, especially freesias.
The delicate and delicious fragrance of the freesias came in
through the door and floated round Mrs. Wilkins's enraptured nostrils.
Freesias in London were quite beyond her. Occasionally she went into a
shop and asked what they cost, so as just to have an excuse for lifting
up a bunch and smelling them, well knowing that it was something awful
like a shilling for about three flowers. Here they were everywhere--
bursting out of every corner and carpeting the rose beds. Imagine it--
having freesias to pick in armsful if you wanted to, and with glorious
sunshine flooding the room, and in your summer frock, and its being
only the first of April!
"I suppose you realize, don't you, that we've got to heaven?" she said,
beaming at Mrs. Fisher with all the familiarity of a fellow-angel.
"They are considerably younger than I had supposed," thought Mrs.
Fisher, "and not nearly so plain." And she mused a moment, while she
took no notice of Mrs. Wilkins's exuberance, on their instant and
agitated refusal that day at Prince of Wales Terrace to have anything
to do with the giving or the taking of references.
Nothing could affect her, of course; nothing that anybody did.
She was far too solidly seated in respectability. At her back stood
massively in a tremendous row those three great names she had offered,
and they were not the only ones she could turn to for support and
countenance. Even if these young women--she had no grounds for
believing the one out in the garden to be really Lady Caroline Dester,
she had merely been told she was--even if these young women should all
turn out to be what Browning used to call--how well she remembered his
amusing and delightful way of putting thing--Fly-by-Nights, what could
it possibly, or in any way matter to her? Let them fly by night if
they wished. One was not sixty-five for nothing. In any case there
would only be four weeks of it, at the end of which she would see no
more of them. And in the meanwhile there were plenty of places where
she could sit quietly away from them and remember. Also there was her
own sitting-room, a charming room, all honey-coloured furniture and
pictures, with windows to the sea towards Genoa, and a door opening on
to the battlements. The house possessed two sitting-rooms, and she
explained to that pretty creature Lady Caroline--certainly a pretty
creature, whatever else she was; Tennyson would have enjoyed taking her
for blows on the downs--who had seemed inclined to appropriate the
honey-colored one, that she needed some little refuge entirely to
herself because of her stick.
"Nobody wants to see an old woman hobbling about everywhere," she
had said. "I shall be quite content to spend much of my time by myself
in here or sitting out on these convenient battlements."
And she had a very nice bedroom, too; it looked two ways, across
the bay in the morning sun--she liked the morning sun--and onto the
garden. There were only two of these bedrooms with cross-views in the
house, she and Lady Caroline had discovered, and they were by far the
airiest. They each had two beds in them, and she and Lady Caroline had
had the extra beds taken out at once and put into two of the other
rooms. In this way there was much more space and comfort. Lady
Caroline, indeed, had turned hers into a bed-sitting-room, with the
sofa out of the bigger drawing-room and the writing-table and the most
comfortable chair, but she herself had not had to do that because she
had her own sitting-room, equipped with what was necessary. Lady
Caroline had thought at first of taking the bigger sitting-room
entirely for her own, because the dining-room on the floor below could
quite well be used between meals to sit in by the two other, and was a
very pleasant room with nice chairs, but she had not liked the bigger
sitting-room's shape--it was a round room in the tower, with deep slit
windows pierced through the massive walls, and a domed and ribbed
ceiling arranged to look like an open umbrella, and it seemed a little
dark. Undoubtedly Lady Caroline had cast covetous glances at the
honey-coloured room, and if she Mrs. Fisher, had been less firm would
have installed herself in it. Which would have been absurd.
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