Page:Twilight.djvu/299

 intense, blinding. She moved toward it unsteadily. This semi-American atmosphere into which she and her lover had become absorbed was an atmosphere of hustle, kaleidoscopic, shifting.

"If they had only given me time to think I should have known that the clothes and the house-linen, the carpets and curtains, the piano and the choice of a car, could all wait until we came back, could wait even after that. But they tear along and carry us after them in a whirlwind of tempestuous good-nature," Margaret said ruefully in the five minutes they secured together before dinner that Tuesday evening.

"You are doing too much, exhausting your energy, using up your strength. And we have not found time for even one prowl after old furniture in our own way, that we spoke of at Carbies."

"They are spoiling the house with the talk of preserving it. To-day Father told me it was absolutely necessary the floors should be levelled ..."

"I know. And he wants the kitchen concreted. Some wretched person with the lips of a day-labourer and the soul of an iconoclast told him the place was swarming with rats ..."

"We wanted to hear mysterious noises behind the wainscot."

They were half-laughing, but there was an undercurrent of seriousness in their complaining. They