d recently spent seven years in a
purgatory for sinful trees. Here and there in the design onyx-stones
had been set in the wood. The seat itself was beautifully soft. What
captured Vera was chiefly the fact that it did not open at the top, as
most elaborate music-stools do, but at either side. You pressed a
button (onyx) and the panel fell down displaying your music in little
compartments ready to hand; and the eastern moiety of the music-stool
was for piano pieces, and the western moiety for songs. In short, it
was the last word of music-stools; nothing could possibly be newer.

But Cheswardine did not like it, and did not conceal his opinion. He
argued that it would not 'go' with the Chippendale furniture, and Vera
said that all beautiful things 'went' together, and Cheswardine
admitted that they did, rather dryly. You see, they took the matter
seriously because the house was their hobby; they were always changing
its interior, which was more than they could have done for a child,
even if they had had one; and Cheswardine's finer and soberer taste was
always fighting against Vera's predilection for the novel and the
bizarre. Apart from clothes, Vera had not much more than the taste of a
mouse.

They did not quarrel in Bostock's. Indeed, they did not quarrel
anywhere; but after Vera had suggested that he might at any rate humour
her by giving her the music-stool for a Christmas present (she seemed
to think this would somehow help it to 'go' with the Chippendale), and
Cheswardine had politely but firmly declined, there had been a certain
coolness and quite six tears. Vera had caused it to be understood that
even if Cheswardine was NOT interested in music, even if he did hate
music and did call the Broadwood ebony grand ugly, that was no reason
why she should be deprived of a pretty and original music-stool that
would keep her music tidy and that would be HERS. As for it not going
with the Chippendale, that was simply an excuse ... etc.

Hence it is not surprising that the Venetian vases of the seventeenth
century left Vera cold, and that the domestic prospects for Christmas
were a little cold.

However, Vera, with wifely and submissive tact made the best of things;
and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-room, and
drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair retired to rest,
the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with a tender melancholy,
permeated the house, and the servants were grow