"Are you catching the ten o'clock, dear?" Germaine called from her bedroom.
"No such luck!" I warned her. "Phone the office, will you, and tell them I'm feeling under the weather and won't be in till sometime tomorrow."
This seemed like a good chance to do some exploring--since the Rutherfords had temporarily abandoned the field--though I needn't have bothered since I had seen photographs of suburban houses like Pook's Hill in a score of different slick-paper pre-war magazines. There was the inevitable colonial-type dining-room, with dark wainscoting below smooth oyster-white plaster, electric candle-sconces, and the necessary array of family silver on the antiqued mahogany sideboard. The windows gave a vista of brown lawn, with the grass still blasted by winter. There was the inevitable chintzy living-room, with a permanently unemployed grand-piano, two or three safely second-rate paintings by safely first-rate defunct foreigners. There was the usual array of sofas, easy chairs, small, middle-sized and biggish tables, with lots of china ash-trays, and a sizable wood-burning fireplace. Of course, you entered the living-room by two steps down from the front hall and there was a separate up-two-steps-entrance to my den. And sure as death and taxes, there was a veritable downstairs lavatory.
I slipped on my coat and hat and stepped out through a French window which led from the living-room to the inevitable paved stone terrace. There were galvanized iron fittings for a summer awning and in the center was a cute little bronze sun-dial. This had an exclamation point and the inscription, "Over the Yard-Arm" at the place where noon should be, and a bronze cocktail glass instead of the sign for four p.m. All the way around the rest of the circle was written in heavy embossed capitals, "The Hell With It!"
My meditations on this facet of the Tompkins character--and I wondered whether I oughtn't to spell 'facet' with a u'--were interrupted by Myrtle.
"Oh, Mr. Tompkins," she called from the kitchen window, in complete repudiation of her earlier appearance as Watson, third lady's maid at Barony Castle, "the man from the kennels is here with Ponto. Where shall I tell him to take the dog?"