ing, she laid her hand upon the door. It opened. The
house was not locked up at all.
She hesitated. Ought she to wait for Henry? He felt strongly about
property, and might prefer to show her over himself. On the other hand,
he had told her to keep in the dry, and the porch was beginning to drip.
So she went in, and the draught from inside slammed the door behind.
Desolation greeted her. Dirty finger-prints were on the hall-windows,
flue and rubbish on its unwashed boards. The civilisation of luggage
had been here for a month, and then decamped. Dining-room and
drawing-room--right and left--were guessed only by their wallpapers.
They were just rooms where one could shelter from the rain. Across the
ceiling of each ran a great beam. The dining-room and hall revealed
theirs openly, but the drawing-room's was match-boarded--because the
facts of life must be concealed from ladies? Drawing-room, dining-room,
and hall--how petty the names sounded! Here were simply three rooms
where children could play and friends shelter from the rain. Yes, and
they were beautiful.
Then she opened one of the doors opposite--there were two--and exchanged
wall-papers for whitewash. It was the servants' part, though she
scarcely realised that: just rooms again, where friends might shelter.
The garden at the back was full of flowering cherries and plums. Farther
on were hints of the meadow and a black cliff of pines. Yes, the meadow
was beautiful.
Penned in by the desolate weather, she recaptured the sense of space
which the motor had tried to rob from her. She remembered again that ten
square miles are not ten times as wonderful as one square mile, that
a thousand square miles are not practically the same as heaven. The
phantom of bigness, which London encourages, was laid for ever when she
paced from the hall at Howards End to its kitchen and heard the rain run
this way and that where the watershed of the roof divided it.
Now Helen came to her mind, scrutinising half Wessex from the ridge of
the Purbeck Downs, and saying: "You will have to lose something." She
was not so sure. For instance she would double her kingdom by opening
the door that concealed the stairs.
Now she thought of the map of Africa; of empires; of her father; of
the two supreme nations, streams of whose life warmed her blood, but,
mingling, had cooled her brain. She paced back into the hall, and as she
did so the house reverberated.
"Is that you, Henry?" she cal
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