Page:The Smart Set (Volume 1).djvu/443



HAT a queer world it is,—the world of the English story-book! If we could climb up some sort of literary bean-stalk into this region we should doubtless find it, in many respects, as different from our workaday world as that strange land which burst upon the view of the redoubtable Jack when he had solved the mystery of the thick stems and interlacing branches stretching skyward from his mother's little garden.

We could not go far, I think, before we should happen upon the gray old mansion among the trees where the most important family of the storybook people lives. How many times, in books, have we seen its mullioned windows, its heavy stacks of chimneys, its ivy-covered gables and turrets! The picturesque lodge at the entrance, the long avenue lined with ancient elms, the rooks cawing overhead, the park, with its giant oaks and beeches; the shrubberies, where the nightingale sings; the broad stone terraces, and the lawn with the medlar tree—we have known them in many a book; even the stable clock has a familiar look. Hard by is the old English garden, where the peaches are ripening on the sunny south wall and the peacocks plume themselves on the mossy sun-dial. Here is the rose-tree walk where, in their season, the roses run riot in a flame of mingled white and pink and crimson; and here, sweet-smelling kitchen herbs struggle for supremacy with lupine and gillyflower and London-pride, or pour forth their delicate scents just beyond the clipped yew-tree hedge, which shuts out the kitchen garden and the currant trees. Here, too, the brown bees hum among the Canterbury bells, and the lavender bush lifts its spikes of fragrant mauve blossoms, while hollyhocks gleam pink and white and yellow in stately rows amid tall white lilies and sweet-william and quaint monk's-hood.

When we enter the gray old mansion we find that its architecture is somewhat peculiar. For one thing, you cannot go far within it before you will come upon a green baize door. Then, too, there are the curtained recesses—apparently of a special design—where one always hears conversation not intended for his ear. In the workaday world this listening would be uncharitably called eavesdropping. But no one thinks anything of it here. No; poor little Phyllis is obliged to listen, at least until she has heard enough to rob her of her woman's peace. She is not to blame—the recess is built in that way. Even if she tries to leave—and she sometimes makes a feeble attempt to do so—something roots her to the spot.

The conservatory is another queer place. It is generally infested by the young man who suddenly walks in when one is about to make a proposal of marriage. It is true that he sometimes walks into other rooms, and occasionally he is already on the spot, admiring his hostess's collection of rare ferns and exotics (in the dark), and he suddenly appears, after tipping over a vase or muttering an exclamation. But usually it happens that young Knollys has asked his fair young partner to sit out the next dance in the dim, cool conservatory, and although she knows that she must