PAGE 6
A Matter Of Taste
by
‘No,’ Ella agreed, with a tragic little smile, ‘it–it looks as if it would last.’
‘Last! I should just think so! And here’s a hatstand–you could almost swear it was carved wood of some sort, but it’s only cast-iron painted; indestructible, you see; they told me that was the latest dodge–wonderful how cheaply they turn them out, isn’t it?’
‘I thought you said you were helped?’
‘Oh, I didn’t want any help here–this is only the passage, you know!’
Yes, it was only the passage–and yet she had been picturing such a charming entrance, with a draped arch, a graceful lamp, a fresh bright paper, a small buffet of genuine old oak, and so on. She suppressed a sigh as she passed on; after all, so long as the rooms themselves were all right, it did not so very much matter, and she knew that her mother’s taste could be trusted.
But on the threshold of the dining-room she stopped aghast. The walls had been distempered a particularly hideous drab; the curtains were mustard yellow; the carpet was a dull brown; the mottled marble mantelpiece, for which she had been intending to substitute one in walnut wood with tiles, still shone in slabs of petrified brawn; there was a huge mahogany sideboard of a kind she had only seen in old-fashioned hotels.
‘Comfortable, eh?’ remarked George. ‘Lots of wear in those curtains!’
Unhappily there was, as Ella was only too well aware. ‘You did this room yourself too, then, George?’ she managed to say, without betraying herself by her voice.
‘Yes, I chose everything here. You see, Ella, we shall only use this room for meals.’
‘Only for meals, yes,’ she acquiesced with a shudder; ‘but–George, surely you said mother had helped you with the rooms?’
‘What! your mother? No, Ella; her notions are rather too grand for me. It was Jessie and Carrie I meant. Just come and see what they’ve made of my den.’
Ella followed. The window–which had commanded such a cheerful outlook into one of the pretty gardens, with a pink thorn, a laburnum-tree or two, and some sycamores which still flourish fresh and fair on Campden Hill–was obscured now by some detestable contrivance in transparent paper imitating stained glass.
‘That was the girls’ notion,’ said George, following the direction of her eyes; ‘they fixed it all themselves–it was their present to me. Pretty of them to think of it, wasn’t it? I call it an immense improvement, and, you see, it’s stuck on with some patent cement varnish, so it can’t rub off. You get the effect better if you stand here–now, see how well the colours come out in the sun!’
If only they would come out! But what could she do but stand and admire hypocritically? Her eyes, in spite of herself, seemed drawn to that bright-hued sham intersected by black lines intended to represent leading; of the room itself she only saw vaguely that it was not unworthy of the window.
‘Nothing to what they’ve done with the drawing-room!’ said innocent George, beaming; ‘come along, darling, you’ll scarcely know the place.’
And Ella, reduced to a condition of stony stupor, followed to the drawing-room. She did not know the place, indeed. It was a quaintly-shaped, irregular room, with French windows opening upon the garden on one side and a deep bow-window on another; when she had last seen it, the walls were covered with a paper so pleasing in tone and design that she had almost decided to retain it. That paper was gone, and in its place a gaudy semi-Chinese pattern of unknown birds, flying and perching on sprawling branches laden with impossible flowers. And then the furniture–the ‘elegant drawing-room suite’ in brilliant plush and shiny satin, the cheap cabinets, and the ready-made black and gilt overmantel, with its panels of swans, hawthorn-blossom, and landscapes sketchily daubed on dead gold–surely it had all been transferred bodily from the stage of some carelessly mounted farcical comedy!
Ella’s horrified gaze gradually took in other features–the china monkeys swinging on cords, the porcelain parrots hanging in great brass rings, huge misshapen terra-cotta jars and pots, dead grass in bloated drain-pipes, tambourines, beribboned and painted with kittens and robins, enormous wooden sabots, gilded Japanese fans, a woolly white rug and a bright Kidderminster carpet.