built house standing in its own grounds of five acres—garden, orchard pasture, magnificent view.” Being as unversed in the ways of house agents as in those of women, he took it on trust, paid a quarter’s rent, and went down to take possession. He had instructed the local house agent to find a woman who would come in for a few hours daily to “do for him.”
“I’ll have no silly women living in the house,” said he.
It was on an inclement June evening that the station fly set him down in front of his new house. The drive had been long and dreary, and seemed to Maurice more like seventy miles than seven. Now he let down the carriage window and thrust his head into the rain to see his new house. It was a stucco villa, with iron railings in the worst possible taste. It had an air at once new and worn out; no one seemed ever to have lived in it, and yet everything about it was broken and shabby. The door stuck a little at first with the damp, and when at last it opened and Maurice went over his house, he found it furnished mainly with oil-cloth and three-legged tables, and photographs in Oxford frames—like a seaside lodging-house. The
