he house. The problem of
equipping the kitchen had seemed insoluble until Guy heard of a sale in
the neighborhood. He had bicycled over to this and bought the contents
of the large kitchen at auction. The result was that the dresser
encroached upon the table, that the table had one leg in the fender, and
that a row of graduated dish-covers, the largest of which would have
sheltered two turkeys, occupied whatever space was left. All that
remained of Guy's own money had been invested in his kitchen, and he
accounted for the large size of everything by the fact of the auction's
having been held in the open air, where everything had looked so much
smaller. Now, as he contemplated dubiously the result, he wondered what
Miss Peasey would say to it. She and the books would arrive together at
half past nine to-night. He hoped his unknown housekeeper would not be
irritated by these dish-covers, and as a precautionary measure he
unhooked the largest, carried it up-stairs, and deposited it on the
floor of an unfurnished bedroom. The staircase ran steep and straight up
from the hall into a long corridor with more casements opening on the
orchard behind. The bedroom at one end was dedicated to the hope of
Michael Fane's occupation and was always referred to in letters as his:
"_By the way I put the largest dish-cover in your bedroom._" The next
two bedrooms were also empty and belonged in spirit to the friends with
whom Guy had lived during his last year at Oxford. The fourth was his
own, very simply and sparsely furnished in comparison with the bedroom
up in the roof which was intended for Miss Peasey. The preparation of
that for an elderly unmarried woman had involved a certain
voluptuousness of rep and fumed oak and heavily decorated china, the
fruit of the second-best bedroom in the house of the dish-covers. As
Guy went up the crooked stairs and knocked his head on three successive
beams, he hoped Miss Peasey would not be as disproportionately large as
the kitchen dresser. Her handwriting had been spidery enough, and he
pictured her hopefully as small and wizened. Miss Peasey's bower with
the big dormer window surveying the tree-tops of the orchard was
certainly a success, and Guy saw that Michael had with happy intuition
of female aspiration hung on the wall opposite her bed a large
steel-engraving of Dore's Martyrs, which had been included with two
hammocks and a fishing-rod in one of the odd lots lightly bid for at the
auction