Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/290

 'We'll all go,' said Sears.

It touched him to see how natural was the meeting and how good the esprit de corps established between his fiancée and the children of Prunella, yet he realized with half a sigh that this new wife had never had any deep, emotional longing for children; if she had she could not have played with them so naturally. There was in her none of the tight embarrassment that women who love children must so often manifest before they themselves have borne them.

'I love children.' Lanice confided to him; and was surprised when he answered rather wearily,

'Yes—and kittens, too.'

They went into the house. It was exquisitely chill after the sun beating down in the garden. The rugs had been rolled up for the summer, and straw matting that smelled sweetly and slightly sickishly had been laid down. There were cool plants, slippery black horsehair, quaint glazed chintzes. The stairway, wide and carved, led off into more cool, quiet rooms where everything was in order. On each washstand the towels hung unused, seemingly unusable. The pattern on the honest yellow soap in the heavy white dishes had never been blurred by water. The curtains were immaculate. The windows shone.

'You must have told your housekeeper I was coming,' she said.

Professor Ripley evidently was so accustomed to this perfection he did not at first understand her remark.