Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/192

 as if to make themselves wholly ridiculous, they always dressed for dinner. The town was full of stories of how Mrs. Furness cooked in an evening gown, and Albert Edward, her husband, after dinner, lighted a post-prandial clay pipe of army cut, and smoked solemnly in his "soup-and-fish." Some one, on a midwinter evening, had seen Flora, with her bare arms goose-fleshed in a frozen drawing-room, trying to keep herself warm by playing Beethoven sonatas, while her brother, Howard Hartley Furness, twisted old newspapers into solid wads and fed them into the fireplace to encourage the cannel-coal.

I suspect that the "some one" who saw this was a younger Gorman, spying through a crack in the closed shutters of the Furness front window. They lived under a common roof—the Germans and the Furnesses—in the old Voss house, on the corner of High and Leedy streets, the Furnesses having a front door on High Street and the Gormans using what had once been a side door and veranda on Leedy. Their lawns were separated by a class barrier in the shape of an old lilac hedge, planted by the last of the Vosses, Miss Elizabeth Voss, when she had been compelled to rent hah* her residence in order to be able to live in the other half. She had divided the house with a series of soundproof walls, filled with sawdust. She had cut the back yard in two with a spite-fence high enough to discourage any social aspiration. And although