ciation.
"Delightfully bright. As though it would shine even if the sun didn't."
And she abandoned herself to the rapture of seeing a house and garden
that were for once better even than the agent's superlatives. And within
her grasp if she chose--within her grasp.

She made the garden melodious with soft appreciative sounds. She had a
small voice for her size but quite a charming one, a little live bird of
a voice, bright and sweet. It was a clear unruffled afternoon; even the
unseen wheel-barrow had very sensibly ceased to creak and seemed to be
somewhere listening....

Only one trivial matter marred their easy explorations;--his boots
remained unlaced. No propitious moment came when he could stoop and lace
them. He was not a dexterous man with eyelets, and stooping made him
grunt and his head swim. He hoped these trailing imperfections went
unmarked. He tried subtly to lead this charming lady about and at the
same time walk a little behind her. She on her part could not determine
whether he would be displeased or not if she noticed this slight
embarrassment and asked him to set it right. They were quite long
leather laces and they flew about with a sturdy negligence of anything
but their own offensive contentment, like a gross man who whistles a
vulgar tune as he goes round some ancient church; flick, flock, they
went, and flip, flap, enjoying themselves, and sometimes he trod on one
and halted in his steps, and sometimes for a moment she felt her foot
tether him. But man is the adaptable animal and presently they both
became more used to these inconveniences and more mechanical in their
efforts to avoid them. They treated those laces then exactly as nice
people would treat that gross man; a minimum of polite attention and all
the rest pointedly directed away from him....

The garden was full of things that people dream about doing in their
gardens and mostly never do. There was a rose garden all blooming in
chorus, and with pillar-roses and arches that were not so much growths
as overflowing cornucopias of roses, and a neat orchard with shapely
trees white-painted to their exact middles, a stone wall bearing
clematis and a clothes-line so gay with Mr. Brumley's blue and white
flannel shirts that it seemed an essential part of the design. And then
there was a great border of herbaceous perennials backed by delphiniums
and monkshood already in flower and budding hollyhocks rising to their
duty; a border that reared