And
I daresay she may have had, somewhere hidden away, a manual for young
hostesses. If so, it must have been a good one. But to say this is to
belittle Mary's powers of intuition. It was they, sharpened by her
adoration of William, and by her intensity for everything around him,
that made her so efficient a housewife.
If she possessed a manual for young house-hunters it was assuredly not
by the light of this that she had chosen the home they were installed
in. The `sort of cottage' had been vacant for many years--an
unpromising and ineligible object, a mile away from a village, and
three miles away from a railway station. The main part of it was an
actual cottage, of seventeenth-century workmanship; but a little
stuccoed wing had been added to each side of it, in 1850 or
thereabouts, by an eccentric old gentleman who at that time chose to
make it his home. He had added also the small stable, a dairy, and
other appanages. For these, and for garden, there was plenty of room,
as he had purchased and enclosed half an acre of the surrounding land
Those two stuccoed, very Victorian wings of his, each with a sash-
window above and a French window below, consorted queerly with the old
red brick and the latticed panes. And the long wooden veranda that he
had invoked did not unify the trinity.
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