Chapter XIII - Page 2

as yet, but the pump was just outside, and nobody thought there would be any difficulty about filling the bath every morning by means of the pump combined with buckets. Over the bathroom was the attic. This was Annalise's bedroom. Nobody thought there would be any difficulty about that either; nobody, in fact, thought anything about anything. It was a simple place, after the manner of attics, with a window in its sloping ceiling through which stars might be studied with great comfort as one lay in bed. A frugal mind, an earnest soul, would have liked the attic, would have found a healthy enjoyment in a place so plain and fresh, so swept in windy weather by the airs of heaven. A poet, too, would certainly have flooded any parts of it that seemed dark with the splendour of his own inner light; a nature-lover, again, would have quickly discovered the spiders that dwelt in its corners, and spent profitable hours on all fours observing them. But an Annalise--what was she to make of such a place? Is it not true that the less a person has inside him of culture and imagination the more he wants outside him of the upholstery of life? I think it is true; and if it is, then the vacancy of Annalise's mind may be measured by the fact that what she demanded of life in return for the negative services of not crying and wringing her hands was nothing less filled with food and sofas and servants than a grand ducal palace.

But neither Priscilla nor Fritzing knew anything of Annalise's mind, and if they had they would instantly have forgotten it again, of such extreme unimportance would it have seemed. Nor would I dwell on it myself if it were not that its very vacancy and smallness was the cause of huge upheavals in Creeper Cottage, and the stone that the builders ignored if they did not actually reject behaved as such stones sometimes do and came down upon the builders' heads and crushed them. Annalise, you see, was unable to appreciate peace, yet on the other hand she was very able to destroy the peace of other people; and Priscilla meant her cottage to be so peaceful--a temple, a holy place, within whose quiet walls sacred years were going to be spent in doing justly, in loving mercy, in walking humbly. True she had not as yet made a nearer acquaintance with its inconveniences, but anyhow she held the theory that inconveniences were things to be laughed at and somehow circumvented, and that they do not enter into the consideration of persons whose thoughts are absorbed by the burning desire to live out their ideals. "You can be happy in any place whatever," she remarked to Tussie on the Monday, when he was expressing fears as to her future comfort; "absolutely any place will do--a tub, a dingle, the top of a pillar--any place at all, if only your soul is on fire."

"Of course you can," cried Tussie, ready to kiss her feet.

"And look how comfortable my cottage seems," said Priscilla,