Baring-Gould Sabine
Arminell, Vol. 3
In our Latin grammars we learned “Nemo omnibus horis sapit,” but that may be better rendered, “Quis non omnibus horis delirat?”
The anthropologist and antiquary delight in exploring the kitchen middens of a lost race, heaps of bones, and shells, and broken potsherds rejected by a population that lived in pre-historic times. But, oh, what kitchen middens are about our own selves, at our own doors, of empty shells and dismarrowed bones of old convictions, old superstitions, old conceits, old ambitions, old hopes! Where is the meat? Where the nutriment? Nowhere; gone past recall; only the dead husks, and shells, and bones, and potsherds remain. Open your desk, pull out the secret drawer, and what are revealed? A dry flower – the refuse scrap of an old passion; a worthless voucher of a bad investment; a MS. poem which was refused by every magazine; a mother’s Bible, monument of a dead belief. Go, turn over your own kitchen middens, and then come and argue with me that such a delusion as that of Captain Saltren is impossible. I tell you it is paralleled every year.
And now, sitting on the heap of stones, full of doubt, and yet not altogether a prey to despair, Captain Saltren took the red book again, and began to read it, first at the beginning, then turning to the middle, then looking to the end. Then he put it from him once more, and, with the cold sweat streaming over his face, he walked to the edge of the quarry, and there knelt down to pray. Had he been deceived? Was he not now subjected to a fiery trial of his faith – a last assault of the Evil One? This was indeed a possibility, and it was a possibility to which he clung desperately.
A little while ago we saw Giles Saltren humiliated and crushed, passing through the flame of disappointment and disenchantment, the purgatorial flame that in this life tries every man. In that fire the young man’s self-esteem and self-reliance had shrivelled up and been reduced to ash. And now his reputed father entered the same furnace.
He prayed and wrestled in spirit, wringing his hands, and with sweat and tears commingled streaming down his cheeks. He prayed that he might be given a token. He could not, he would not, accept the humiliation. He fought against it with all the powers of his soul and mind.
Then he stood up. He was resolved what to do. He would walk along the ledge of rock to the Owl’s Nest, holding the red book in his hand instead of clinging to the ivy bands. If that book stayed him up and sustained him in equilibrium till he reached the Cave, then he would still believe in his mission, and the revelations that attended it. But if he had erred, why then —
Holding the book he began the perilous walk. He took three steps forward, and then the judgment was pronounced.
CHAPTER XLI.
SOCIAL SUICIDE
When Giles Saltren had left town to return to Orleigh his uncle remained with Arminell. The girl asked Mr. Welsh to leave her for half an hour to collect her thoughts and resolve on what she would do; and he went off to the British Museum to look at the marbles till he considered she had been allowed sufficient time to decide her course, and then he returned to the inn. She was ready for him, composed, seated on the sofa, pale, and dark under the eyes.
“Well, Miss Inglett,” said Welsh, “I’ve been studying the busts of the Roman Emperors and their wives, and imagining them dressed in our nineteenth-century costume; and, upon my word, I believe they would pass for ordinary English men and women. I believe dress has much to do with the determination of character. Conceive of Domitian in a light, modern summer suit – in that he could not be bloodthirsty and a tyrant. Imagine me in a toga, and you may imagine me committing any monstrosity. Dress does it. How about your affairs? Are you going to Aunt Hermione?”
“To Lady Hermione Woodhead?” corrected Arminell, with a touch of haughtiness. “No.”
“Then what will you do? I’ll take the liberty of a chair.” He seated himself. “I can’t get their busts out of my head – however, go on.”
“Mr. Welsh, I wish to state to you exactly what I have done, and let you see how I am circumstanced. I have formed my own opinion as to what I must do, and I shall be glad afterwards to hear what you think of my determination. You have shown me kindness in coming here, and offering your help, and I am not so ungracious as to refuse to accept, to some extent, the help so readily offered.”
“I shall be proud, young lady.”
“Let me then proceed to tell you how stands the case, and then you will comprehend why I have taken my resolution. I ran away from home with your nephew, moved by a vague romantic dream, which, when I try to recall, partly escapes me, and appears to me now altogether absurd.”
“You were not dressed for the part,” threw in Welsh. “You could no more be the heroine in modern vest and the now fashionable hat, than I could commit the crimes of Cæsar in this suit.”
“In the first place,” pursued Arminell, disregarding the interruption, “I was filled with the spirit of unrest and discontent, which made me undervalue everything I had, and crave for and over-estimate everything I had not. With my mind ill at ease, I was ready to catch at whatever chance offered of escape from the vulgar round of daily life, and plunge into a new, heroic and exciting career. The chance came. Your nephew believed that he was my half-brother.”
“Young Jack-an-apes!” intercalated Welsh.
“That he was my dear father’s son by a former fictitious marriage with your sister Mrs. Saltren, I believed, as firmly as your nephew believed it; and I was extremely indignant with my poor father for what I thought was his dishonourable conduct in the matter, and for the hypocrisy of his after life. I thought that, if I ran away with your nephew, I would force him – I mean my lord – to acknowledge the tie, and so do an act of tardy justice to his son. Then, in the next place, I was filled with exalted ideas of what we ought to do in this world, that we were to be social knights errant, rambling about at our own free will, redressing wrongs, and I despised the sober virtues of my father, and the ordinary social duties, with the execution of which my step-mother filled up her life. I thought that a brilliant career was open to your nephew, and that I might take a share in it, that we would make ourselves names, and effect great things for the social regeneration of the age. It was all nonsense and moonshine. I see that clearly enough now. My wonder is that I did not see it before. But the step has been taken and cannot be recalled. I have broken with my family and with my class, I cannot ask to have links rewelded which I wilfully snapped, to be reinstalled in a place I deliberately vacated. Nemesis has overtaken me, and even the gods bow to Nemesis.”
“You are exaggerating,” interrupted Welsh; “you have, I admit, acted like a donkey – excuse the expression, no other is as forcible and as true – but I find no such irretrievable mischief done as you suppose. Fortunately the mistake has been corrected at once. If you will go home, or to Lady Woodhead – ”
“Lady Hermione Woodhead,” corrected Arminell.
“Or to Lady Hermione Woodhead – all will be well. What might have been a catastrophe is averted.”
“No,” answered Arminell, “all will not be well. Excuse me if I flatly contradict you. There is something else you have not reckoned on, but which I must take into my calculations. I shall never forget what I have done, never forgive myself for having embittered the last moments of my dear father’s life, never for having thought unworthily of him, and let him see that he had lost my esteem. If I were to return home, now or later from my aunt’s house, I could not shake off the sense of self-reproach, of self-loathing which I now feel. There is one way, and one way only, in which I can recover my self-respect and peace of mind.”
“And that is – ?”
“By not going home.”
“Well – go to your aunt’s.”
“I should be there for a month, and after that must return to Orleigh. No – that is not possible. Do you not see that several reasons conspire against my taking that course?”
“Pray let me know them.”
“In the first place, it is certain to have leaked out that I ran away from home. My conduct will be talked about and commented on in Orleigh, in the county. It will become part of the scandal published in the society papers, and be read and laughed over by the clerks and shop-girls who take in these papers, whose diet it is. Everywhere, in all classes, the story will be told how the Honourable Arminell Inglett, only daughter of Giles, tenth Baron Lamerton of Orleigh, and his first wife, the Lady Lucy Hele, daughter of the Earl of Anstey, had eloped with the son of a mining captain, the tutor to her half-brother, and how that they were discovered together in a little inn in Bloomsbury.”
“No,” said Welsh, impatiently. “If you will act as Jingles has suggested, this will never be known. He is back at Orleigh, or will be there this afternoon, and you will be at Portland Place, where your maid will find you. What more natural than that you should return to-morrow home, on account of your father’s death? As for the society papers – if they get an inkling of the real facts – I am connected with the press. I can snuff the light out. There are ways and means. Leave that to me.”
“But, Mr. Welsh, suppose that suspicion has been roused at Orleigh – Mrs. Cribbage has to be considered. That woman will not leave a stone unturned till she has routed out everything. I used to say that was why the finger ends were always out of her gloves. I would have to equivocate, and perhaps to lie, when asked point-blank questions which if answered would betray the truth. I would be putting my dear step-mother to the same inconvenience and humiliation.”
“Trust her wit and knowledge of the world to evade Mrs. Cribbage.”
“But I cannot. I have not the wit.”
Mr. Welsh was vexed, he stamped impatiently.
“I can’t follow you in this,” he said.
“Well, Mr. Welsh, then perhaps you may in what I give you as my next reason. I feel bound morally to take the consequences of my act. When a wretched girl flings herself over London Bridge, perhaps she feels a spasm of regret for the life she is throwing away, as the water closes over her, but she drowns all the same.”
“Not at all, when there are boats put forth to the rescue, and hands extended to haul her in.”
“To rescue her for what? – To be brought before a magistrate, and to have her miserable story published in the daily penny papers. Why, Mr. Welsh, her friends regret that her body was not rolled down into the deep sea, or smothered under a bed of Thames mud; that were better than the publication of her infamy.”
“What will you have?”
“I have made the plunge; I must go down.”
“Not if I can pull you out.”
“You cannot pull me out. I made my leap out of my social order. What I have done has been to commit social suicide. There is no recovery for me save at a cost which I refuse to pay. I have heard that those who have been half drowned suffer infinite agonies on the return of vitality. I shrink from these pains. I know what it would be were I fished up and thrown on my own shore again. I would tingle and smart in every fibre of my consciousness, and cry out to be cast in again. No, Mr. Welsh, through youthful impetuosity and wrong-headedness I have jumped out of my social world, and I must abide by the consequences. As the Honourable Arminell Inglett I have ceased to exist. I die out of the peerage, die out of my order, die out of the recognition, though not the memory of my relatives. But I live on as plain Miss Inglett, one of the countless members of the great Middle Class.”
James Welsh looked at the girl with puzzlement in his face. Spots of flame had come into her pale cheeks, and to the temples, as she spoke, and she moved her slender fingers on her lap in her eagerness to make herself explicit and her difficulties intelligible.
“I don’t understand you, Miss Inglett. That is, I do not see what is your intention.”
“I mean that I have committed social suicide, and I do not wish to be saved either for my friends’ sake or for my own. I ask you kindly to get my death inserted in the Times and the other daily papers.”
“Your actual death?”
“A statement that on such a day died the Honourable Arminell Inglett, only daughter of the late Lord Lamerton. That will suffice; it proclaims to society that I have ceased to belong to it. Of course my dear step-mother and my aunt and the family solicitors shall know the truth. I have money that comes to me from my mother. A statement of my death in the Times will not constitute legal death, but it will suffice to establish my social death.”
“You are taking an extraordinary and unwarrantable course.”
“Extraordinary it may be, but not unwarranted. I have the justification within, in my conscience. When one has done that which is wrong, one is called to suffer for it, and the conscience is never cleansed and restored without expiating pains. If I were to return to Orleigh I would die morally, of that I am sure, because it would be a shirking of the consequences which my foolish act has brought down on me.”
“There may be something in that,” said Welsh.
“I will write to Lady Lamerton and tell her everything and assure her that my decision is irrevocable. I have caused her so much pain, I have behaved so badly to my father, I have been so ungrateful for all the happy days and pleasant comforts of dear, dear Orleigh” – her eyes filled with tears, and she was unable to finish her sentence.
Mr. Welsh said nothing.
“No,” she said, after a pause – “No, Mr. Welsh, I cannot in conscience go home, there to dissemble and lie to Mrs. Cribbage and to neighbours; and never to be able to shake off the sense of self-reproach for not having frankly accepted the results of my own misconduct. Do you know, Mr. Welsh, I was angry with my father because I thought he was evading his retribution?”
Mr. Welsh, usually a talkative man, felt no inclination now to say a word.
“Mr. Welsh,” said Arminell, “I ask you to go to Portland Place, call on Lady Hermione Woodhead, she is a practical woman of the world; lay the entire case before her, and see if she does not say, ‘Throw her in again, for Heaven’s sake, so as to keep the story out of the papers.’”
“And if her ladyship does not say so?”
“She will say it.”
“If she does not, but asks me to bring you to her, will you go to Portland Place?”
“No; my resolution is taken.”
Welsh stood up and paced the room.
“What the deuce will you do?” he asked. “You are quite a girl, and a pretty girl, and confoundedly inexperienced. You cannot, you must not live alone. My Tryphœna is a good soul; it is true that we are without a cook, but if you do not object to rissoles I shall be happy to offer you such hospitality as my house affords. Shepherd’s Bush is not the most aristocratic quarter of the town, but Poplar is worse; it is not near the theatres and the parks, but you’re welcome to it. Your idea is startling. I’ll go into that cul-de-sac, Queen’s Square, where runs no cab, no ’bus does rumble, and consider it there.”
“Will you see my aunt, Lady Hermione? It will save me writing, and you can explain the circumstances by word better than I can tell them with a pen.”
“Bless me! I have a mind to do so.” He stopped, went to the window, came back, and said abruptly, “Yes, I will. God bless me! To think that I – I of all men, a raging Democrat, should be hansoming to and fro between my Ladies and Honourables.”
“You can do what will give you pleasure,” said the girl with a faint smile – “with a stroke of the pen convert the Honourable Arminell into plain Miss Inglett.”
He did not laugh at the sally. He came in front of her, and stood contemplating her, with his hands behind his back.
“God bless me!” he said, “one can be heroic after all in modern costume. I didn’t think it. Well, I will go, but write me a line to ensure her receiving me in the morning.”
Arminell did as required.
When she had finished the note and was folding it, she looked up at Welsh, and asked, “Have you read the Hecuba?”
“The Hecuba? Classic? Not even in Bohn’s translation.”
“Then the saying of Hecuba to Polyxenes will not occur to you: ‘I am dead before my death, through my ills.’”
“I will go,” he said, and held out his hand. “Give me a shake – it will do me good.”
“But, Mr. Welsh, you will return to me?”
“Yes.” His mouth and eyes were twitching.
“Deuce take it! an aristocrat can do an heroic thing even with a vest and toupee.”
Two hours later the journalist returned.
“Confound these aristocrats,” he said, as he entered, hot and puffing. “They live in daily, hourly terror of public opinion. I wouldn’t be one of them, existing in such a state of quivering terror, not for anything you could offer me. They are like a man I knew who spent all his energies in fighting against draughts. He put sandbags to the bottom of his doors, stuffed cotton-wool into the crevices of his windows, papered over the joints of his flooring, corked up the key-holes, and yet was always catching catarrh from draughts that came from – no one knows where. What they fear is breath – the breath of public opinion.”
“What did my aunt say?” asked Arminell.
“Say? In the most elegant and roundabout way what may be summarized in four words – ‘Chuck her in again.’”
“I said as much.”
“Come, Miss Inglett. I have telegraphed to Tryphœna to do two extra rissoles. We shall pass the stores, and I’ll buy a tin of prawns and a bottle of Noyeau jelly. Pack up your traps. The cab is at the door. Sorry to-day is Monday, or you should have had something better than rissoles.”
CHAPTER XLII.
SHEPHERD’S BUSH
“Here we are,” said Mr. Welsh, “The Avenue – the most stylish part of Shepherd’s Bush, as it is of New York. You sit still in the fly whilst I go in and make an explanation to her ladyship. I’ll take that bottle of Noyeau you have been nursing; I have the canister of prawns in my coat-pocket; I am sorry before purchasing it that I forgot to ask you if you preferred Loch Awe salmon. What is your favourite tipple? You will hear from my wife that we have no cook. The last we got became inebriated, and we had to dismiss her. We have been without one for a fortnight. Tryphœna – that is, her ladyship – upon my word I have been so mixed up with aristocrats of late, that I find myself giving a title to every one I meet. What was I saying? Oh! that her ladyship has all the cooking to do now? You sit quiet. No fumbling after your purse; I pay the cabby because I engaged him. We of the Upper Ten, under present depression, do not keep our own carriages and livery servants – we hire as we want.”
Under all Welsh’s rollicking humour lay real kindness of heart. Arminell felt it, and drew towards this man, so unlike any other man with whom she was acquainted, or whom she had met. She knew that he was perfectly reliable, that he would do everything in his power to serve her, and that a vast store of tenderness and consideration lay veiled under an affectation of boisterousness and burlesque.
How is it that when we do a kindness we endeavour to minimise it? We disguise the fact that what we do costs us something, that it gives us trouble, that it draws down on us irksome responsibilities? It is not that we are ashamed of ourselves for doing kindnesses, that we think it unmanly to be unselfish, but rather that we fear to embarrass the person who receives favours at our hands.
Mr. Welsh had really sacrificed much that day for Arminell. He was to have met an editor and arranged with him for articles for his paper. He had not kept his appointment; that might possibly be resented, and lead to pecuniary loss, to some one else being engaged in his room. Editors are unforgiving. “Yes,” said Mr. Welsh that same afternoon, when he found that what he dreaded had occurred, “a Domitian is possible still in our costume, but the tyrants confine their ferocity to aspirants after literary work. They cut off their heads, they put out their eyes, and they disjoint their noses wholesale.”
Presently Welsh put his head to the cab door and said cheerfully, “All right, I’ve broken it to her ladyship. She don’t know all. You are a distant and disowned relative of the noble house of Lamerton. That is what I have told her; and I am your guardian for the time. I have explained. Come in. The maid-of-all-work don’t clean herself till the afternoon, and is now in hiding behind the hall door. She spends the morning in accumulating the dirt of the house on her person, when no one is expected to call, and she scrubs it off after lunch.” He opened the cab door, and conducted her into the house. “I will lug the slavey out from behind the door,” he said, “if you will step into the dining room; and then she and I will get the luggage from the cab. Your room is not yet ready. Go in there.” He opened the door on his left, and ushered Arminell into the little apartment.
“Excuse me if I leave you,” he said, “and excuse Mrs. Welsh for a bit. She is rummaging somewhere. We have, as she will tell you presently, no cook. The last – ” he made pantomimic signs of putting a bottle to his lips. Then he went out, and for a while there reached Arminell from the narrow front passage, somewhat grandly designated the hall, sounds of the moving of her luggage.
A moment later, and a whispered conversation from outside the door reached her ears.
“It’s no use – there are only scraps. How can you suggest rissoles? There is no time for the preparation of delicacies. If we are to have them, it must be for dinner. I did not expect you at noon, much less that you would be bringing a visitor. Your telegram arrived one minute before yourself.”
“Not so loud,” whispered James Welsh, “or she will hear. You must provide enough to eat, of course. Send out for steak.”
“Nonsense, James; it is lunch time already. She must manage with scraps, and them cold scraps are wholesome. What doesn’t poison fattens.”
“You couldn’t, I suppose, have the scraps warmed, or” – somewhat louder, with a flash of inspiration – “or converted into a haricot?”
“How can you talk like this, James? Go on, suggest that they shall be made into a mayonnaise next. To have hot meat means a fire, and there is none to speak of in the kitchen.”
“Only dead scraps! My dear Tryphœna, she belongs to a titled family, a long way off and disowned, you understand, but still – there is a title in the family and – scraps!”
“What else will you have, James? Had you been home yesterday for dinner, there would have been joint, roast; but as you were not, I ate cold meat. Now there are only scraps.”
“Perhaps if you were to turn out the Noyeau jelly in a shape, Tryphœna, it would give the lunch a more distinguished look.”
“Scraps of cold boiled mutton and Noyeau jelly! No, that won’t do. The jelly must be warmed and melted into the shape, and take three hours to cool.”
“I wish I had taken her to the Holborn Restaurant,” groaned Welsh; “what difficulties encumber domestic arrangements!”
“Without a cook – yes,” added his wife.
“Do go in and welcome her,” urged Mr. Welsh.
“I cannot in this condition. You know I have no cook, and must attend to everything. The girl has been impudent this morning, and has given me notice.”
Whilst this discussion was being carried on, Arminell tried not to listen, but the whispers were pitched so high, and were so articulate that scarce a word escaped her.
Then Mr. Welsh whispered, “Do lower your voice, Tryphœna,” and the pair drifted down the passage to the head of the kitchen steps, and what was further discussed there was inaudible.
Arminell looked round the room. Its most prominent feature was the gas-lamp with double burner and globes – the latter a little smoked, suspended from the ceiling by a telescopic tube that allowed just sufficient gas to escape at the joints to advertise itself as gas, not paraffin or electric fluid. This room was the one in which, apparently, Mrs. Welsh sat when she had a cook, and was not engrossed in domestic affairs. Her workbox, knitting, a railway novel, bills paid and unpaid, and one of Mr. Welsh’s stockings with a hole in the heel, showed that she occupied this apartment occasionally.
The door opened, and Mrs. Welsh entered, followed by her husband. She was a stout lady with a flat face, and a pair of large dark eyes, her only beauty. Her hair was not tidy, nor were all the buttons and hooks in place and performing their proper functions about her body.
“How do you do?” she said, extending her hand; “I’m sorry to say I have no cook; nothing is more difficult than to find cooks with characters now-a-days; ladies will give such false characters. What I say is, tell the truth, whatever comes of it. My last cook had a glowing character from the lady with whom she lived in Belgrave Square. I assure you she was in a superior house, quite aristocratic – carriage people; but I could not keep her. I did not myself find out that she drank. I did not suspect it. I knew she was flighty – but at last she went up a ladder, sixty feet high, and could hardly be got down again. It was in an adjoining builder’s yard. The ladder leaned against nothing, it pointed to the sky, and she went up it, and though a stout and elderly woman, looked no bigger than a fly when she had reached the top. Won’t you sit down? or stay – let me take you up to the parlour. We will have the table laid directly for lunch. Mr. Welsh does not generally come home at this time of day, so I was unprepared, and I have no cook. The ladder began to sway with her, for she became nervous at the top, and afraid to come down; quite a crowd collected. Do take off your things. Your room will be ready presently. In the meantime you can lay your bonnet in the drawing-room. I am short of hands now. The steps are rather narrow and steep, but I will lead the way. I’ll see to having water and soap and a towel taken to the best bed-room presently, but my servant is now making herself neat. None of the police liked to go up the ladder after my cook. The united weights at the top, sixty feet, would have made it sway like a bulrush, and perhaps break. This is the drawing-room. Do make yourself comfortable in it and excuse me. My father and mother were carriage people. There he is in his uniform, between the windows, taken when he was courting my mother. You will excuse me, or the girl will spread a dirty instead of a clean tablecloth for lunch. Dear me, the blinds have not been drawn up!”
Then Mrs. Welsh departed. All men and women trail shadows behind them when the sun shines in their faces, but some women, in all conditions of the heavens, drag behind them braid. It would seem as if they had their skirts bound to come undone. As in the classic world certain females were described as being with relaxed zones, so are there females in the modern world in a perpetual condition of relaxed bindings. If Mrs. Welsh had lived in a palæozoic period, when the beasts that inhabited the globe impressed their footprints on the pliant ooze, what perplexity her traces would now produce among the palæontologists, and what triumph in the minds of the anthropologists, who would conclude that these were the footprints of the homo caudatus, the missing link between the ape and man, and point in evidence to the furrow accompanying the impressions of the feet; and Mrs. Welsh always did wear a tail, but the tail was of black binding, sometimes looped, sometimes dragging in ends. As Arminell followed Mrs. Welsh up the stairs, she had to keep well in the rear to avoid treading on this tail.
On reaching the drawing-room, Arminell laid her bonnet and cloak on the sofa, and looked round the room as she looked about that below. The latter had been dreary to the eyes, the former had the superadded dreariness of pretence.
Houses that are uninhabited are haunted by ghosts, and unoccupied rooms by smells. The carpet, the curtains, the wall-paper, the chintz covers, the cold fire-place, send forth odours urgent to attract attention, as soon as the door opens. They are so seldom seen that they will be smelt.
The drawing-room in the Avenue was small, with two narrow windows to it; the walls were papered with an æsthetic dado of bulrushes and water weeds, on a pea-green base; above that ran a pattern picked out with gold, a self-assertive paper. Above the marble mantelshelf was a chimney-piece of looking-glasses and shelves, on which stood several pieces of cheap modern china, mostly Japanese, such as are seen outside Glaves in Oxford Street, in baskets, labelled, “Any of this lot for 2d.”
Against the wall opposite the windows were two blue Delft plates, hung by wires. Between the windows was the miniature of the father of Mrs. Welsh, once a carriageman, but not looking it, wearing the uniform of a marine officer, and the languishment of a lover. He was represented with a waxy face, a curl on his brow, and either water or wadding on his chest.
Upon the table were books radiating from a central opal specimen glass that contained three or four dry everlastings, smelling like corduroys; and the books in very bright cloth had their leaves glued together with the gilding.
Unhappy, occupied with her own trouble though Arminell was, yet she noted these things because they were so different from that to which she was accustomed. Perhaps the rawness of the decoration, the strain after impossible effect, struck Arminell more than the lack of taste. She had been accustomed to furniture and domestic decoration pitched in a key below that of the occupants, but here everything was screwed up above that of such as were supposed to use the room. Elsewhere she had seen chairs and sofas to be sat on, carpets to be walked on, books to be read, wall papers to be covered with paintings. Here even the sun was not allowed to touch the carpet, and the chairs were to be made use of gingerly, and the fire-irons not to be employed at all, and the grate most rarely. After Arminell had spent half-an-hour in this parlour, the whole house reverberated with the boom of a gong; and next moment Mrs. Welsh came in to say that lunch was ready. She had in the meantime dressed herself to do the honours of the meal; had changed her gown, then brushed her hair, and put on rings. Nevertheless she lacked finish. The brooch was not fastened, and threatened to fall, and her dress improver had not been accurately and symmetrically fitted to her person.
