The long house at the top of the Green was gay with rows of pink and
white sun-blinds stuck out like attic roofs. The poplars in the garden
played their play of falling rain.
You waited in the porch, impatient for the opening of the door.
"Mamma--what _will_ it be like?"
Mamma smiled a naughty, pretty smile. She knew what it would be like.
There was a stuffed salmon in a long glass case in the hall. He swam,
over a brown plaster river bed, glued to a milk-blue plaster stream.
You waited in the drawing-room. Drab and dying amber and the dapple of
walnut wood. Chairs dressed in pallid chintz, holding out their skirts
with an air of anxiety. Stuffed love-birds on a branch under a tall glass
shade. On the chimney-piece sand-white pampas grass in clear blood-red
vases, and a white marble clock supporting a gilt Cupid astride over a
gilt ball.
Above the Cupid, in an oval frame, the tinted crayon portrait of a young
girl. A pink and blond young girl with a soft nuzzling mouth and nose.
She was dressed in a spencer and a wide straw hat, and carried a basket
of flowers on her arm. She looked happy, smiling up at the ceiling.
Across the passage a door opening. Voices in the passage, a smell like
rotten apples, a tray that clattered.
Miss Kendal rustled in; tall elegant stiffness girded in black silk.
"How good of you to come, Mrs. Olivier. And to bring Miss Mary."
Her sharp-jointed body was like the high-backed chair it sat on. Yet you
saw that she had once been the young girl in the spencer; head carried
high with the remembered tilt of the girl's head; jaw pushed out at the
chin as if it hung lightly from the edge of the upper lip; the nuzzling
mouth composed to prudence and propriety. A lace cap with pink ribbons
perched on her smooth, ashy blond hair.
Miss Kendal talked to Mamma about weather and gardens; she asked after
the kitchen chimney as if she really cared for it. Every now and then she
looked at you and gave you a nod and a smile to show that she remembered
you were there.
When she smiled her eyes were happy like the eyes of the young girl.
The garden-gate clicked and fell to with a clang. A bell clamoured
suddenly through the quiet house.