The largest sitting-room has a set of black lacquer furniture inlaid with vivid mother-of-pearl; it is deliciously gay in this gay cottage parlour, and certainly no one who possessed these early Victorian treasures could bear to put them on one side. We think if we had been the lucky owner, however, we would have eschewed coupling them with velvet—or, indeed, brought velvet at all under those weather beaten tiles. The mistress of the Villino had a vision—a daring vision—of printed linen with scarlet cherries and impossible birds pecking at them; something with a true Jacobean angularity in it, to link the centuries together, and an uncompromising vividness of tint. That for cushions and sofa-covers. On the floor then, no bright carpet would be admitted. We should have enamelled that floor white, and cast a few rugs down on it, with no more colours in them than faint lemons and greys or creams.
To complete this discursion on cottages, some of us visited the other day a tiny house, where all the downstairs rooms, except the kitchen, had been thrown together, making a charming, long, low living-room with one great black beam across the ceiling. On the walls was a perfect cottage paper, with isolated pink rose-buds well-distanced from each other: a pink rosebud chintz and black carpet dotted with faint stiff roses, made quaint and unusual but very satisfying arrangement. The windows looked out on a pine wood across a hedge of rampant pink Dorothy Roses. Gazing out on the dim, dark green grey aisles of the fir trees one would want the gay note within; and the little Rose-strewn paper was perfection.
Yesterday the Grandfather of Loki dragged the Grandmother in her bath-chair out into the heart of the moors. It’s a sporting bath-chair this. It has been over as much rough ground as a horse artillery gun-carriage, and nothing in the matter of obstacles stops it unless it is barbed wire; it was chosen as light in make as possible, and now it has a rakish, weather-beaten appearance, like an old mountain mule.
The rare strangers we meet on our wild career regard us with varied sentiments. Some are obviously filled with compassion over the joggling the occupant of the bath-chair must be enduring. “What can that fool of a man be about to expose that wretchedly delicate woman to such suffering?” their expression says to us as they pass. Others, on the other hand, are horror-stricken at the spectacle of the wifely brutality that condemns this weakly, good-natured man to the task of lugging her about. There is a good deal of uphill work, of course, about us, and he goes a good pace. “You ought to get a donkey, Madam,” is their conclusion.