dded that they smelt as if they had always lived in hothouses, and
were quite ready to be friends with gardenias.

She opened her windows. In this she was almost too rigorous for her
maid-servants, who nevertheless adored her. "Plenty of warmth but plenty
of air," was her prescription for a comfortable and healthy house, "and
not too much or too many of anything." Dust, of course, was not to be
known of in her dwelling, but "blacks" were accepted with a certain
resignation as a natural chastening and a message from London.
"They aren't our fault, Annie," she had been known to observe to the
housemaid. "And dust can't be anything else, however you look at it, can
it?" And Annie said, "Well, no, ma'am!" and, when she came to think of
it, felt she had not been a liar in the moment of speaking.

Rosamund never "splashed," or tried to make a show in her house, and
she was very careful never to exceed their sufficient, but not large,
income; but the ordinary things, those things which of necessity come
into the scheme of everyday life, were always of the very best when she
provided them. Dion declared, and really believed, perhaps with reason,
that no tea was so fragrant, no bread and butter so delicious, no toast
so crisp, as theirs; no other linen felt so cool and fresh to the body
as the linen on the beds of the little house; no other silver glittered
so brightly as the silver on their round breakfast-table; no other
little white window curtains in London managed to look so perennially
fresh, and almost blithe, as the curtains which hung at their windows.
Rosamund and Annie might have conversations together on the subject of
"blacks," but Dion never saw any of these distressing visitants.
The mere thought of Rosamund would surely keep them at a more than
respectful distance.

She proved to be a mistress of detail, and a housekeeper whose
enthusiasm was matched by her competence. At first Dion had been rather
surprised when he followed from afar, as is becoming in a man, this
development. Before they settled down in London he had seen in Rosamund
the enthusiastic artist, the joyous traveler, the good comrade, the gay
sportswoman touched with Amazonian glories; he had known in her the deep
lover of pure beauty; he had divined in her something else, a little
strange, a little remote, the girl to whom the "Paradiso" was a
door opening into dreamland, the girl who escaped sometimes almost
mysteriously into regions he knew not