Page:The Semi-detached House.djvu/34

 investigate, and all sorts of red and gold barges came careering up the river, with well-dressed people, looking slightly idiotical as they danced furiously in the hot sun. Aunt Sarah and one or two intimate friends drove down, and envied Blanche her shady trees and cool river, and even insinuated that Arthur was very lucky to have obtained such a good appointment. But there Blanche drew her line, she steadily refused that comfort. She had several visitors the first week, and Dulham Lane was, as Janet and Rose had hoped, much enlivened thereby.

But Mrs. Hopkinson sat with her broad back to the window, pertinaciously declining to look at all the wickedness on wheels that was rolling by her door. She had found that the plan of shutting her shutters would probably end in a fall down her narrow staircase, so she had told her girls not to look out of the window, that poor Willis had reason to believe that the people next door were not at all creditable; and as Janet and Rose were singularly innocent in the ways of the world,