in it, and we have lived here all the time,
so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways
at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you
know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did
them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of
life, you become most carefully conservative!"

But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch,
and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said
hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this
Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to
please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion
greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning,
Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to
this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things
just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to
replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they
stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark
room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak
settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and
samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this
English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The
Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and
they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any
particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it
was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's
ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look!
It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and
they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide
windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your
room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it.
It's a room I'm fond of...."

They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched
door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on
cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted
green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she
said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when
I wa