CONRAD NORMAN
she was now dead, and buried exclusively, her work remained unchanged.
On the High Street side of the house there were still shuttered windows and a sun-blistered, weather-crackled, high-eyebrowed, old colonnade porch that was prouder than paint. Behind their street hedge the Furnesses could drink afternoon tea under the Voss elms, safe from the intruding curiosity of any but neighborly mosquitoes—and Mrs. Furness rather managed to make them part of the function by calling them "midges." (Have I said that the Furnesses came from Bury, near Houghton, in Sussex?) Their front door still had its prim Voss air of being unapproachable to any one who had not been formally introduced—an air of never having extended its bell-pull to the fingers of the great ungloved. Occasionally, as you passed the gate in the hedge, you overheard the antique Furness piano articulating faintly in a high, precise, soprano tinkle. There was not another sound. Whereas, on the Leedy Street side of the house—where there was no hedge the whole brood of Germans lived with unshuttered windows opening on a public veranda, and sang and pounded the piano, and danced to the phonograph, and quarreled and smacked one another and played roughhouse games as noisily as a kennel of young Airedales.
High Street still had some claim to residential respectability, although one house had been rented
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