Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/27

Rh to pass. Two wheelbarrows might have done so without collision, but no wheeled vehicle of larger size.

Inside, on the ground-floor, were three sitting-rooms, drawing-room, and dining-room, looking out on to the carriage-sweep, while behind was what was known as the writing-room, where the aunts read the paper. This looked on to the garden, where the lawn was of sufficient size just to hold a tennis-court, with one pole of the net planted at the edge of the flower-border, while the other pole was so near the path that in going round it, it was necessary to step on to the gravel. Farther away a privet-hedge screened the kitchen garden from view, which stretched a distance of some fifty yards to the foot of the railway embankment, which ran parallel to it. Thus the garden was not overlooked except by the windows of the houses on each side of it, unless a train happened to be stopped by signal immediately behind—"a thing," as Aunt Cathie remarked once to an inquiring tenant for the month of August, when the family would be at the seaside, "did not happen once in a Blue Moon." What a Blue Moon might be (the capitals represent the peculiar emphasis that Aunt Cathie put on the words) neither she nor the tenant were exactly aware, but as a train did not stop there once in one, there was no need to establish its precise nature.

Aunt Cathie at this moment was doing two things at once, which she always recommended Lucia never to attempt—she was waiting for Lucia's arrival from town, and she was contemplating the flower-bed with rather magisterial severity, as if she expected flowers to open if she looked at them hard enough. Certainly the garden was very backward; one cold week had succeeded another, and unless the sun did something decent in the next month, there would not be the "blaze of colour" which ought to dazzle their guests when they came for the first alternate Tuesday in July. The "blaze of colour" was not her own word. The Bishop had said the garden was a blaze of colour to Elizabeth two years ago, and the very next Sunday after that he had preached in the cathedral, drawing a parallel between the gardens of men's houses and the gardens of men's souls, again using that vivid expression, so that it was fair to conclude that this flower-bed had inspired him, which was a very gratifying thought.

Aunt Cathie might have been fifty, but she was not. Instead, she was nearly sixty, while Aunt Elizabeth, who might have been sixty, was more nearly the age that Aunt Cathie might have been. In other respects, too, each of the two sisters seemed confusingly