Mr. Hoope-Arkwright promised obedience. His wife looked around her with complacency, surveying all the rich perfections of the room. ‘I do think she will find the place improved,’ she remarked.
The Hoope-Arkwrights’ treatment of the old house that they had bought from the ruined Restormels had been drastic, though reverent. They had altered everything, and sternly pretended to have altered nothing, after the habit of new-comers who have passed from the first crude stage, of destruction, unto the second crude stage, of imitation. All the old quaintnesses and beauties had been left, but they had all been elaborated, done up, polished, painted, exaggerated, until they hardly knew themselves, and wore the uneasy look of things that had been put up yesterday for effect. The old house was now like the stage-setting of an old house; everything wore the painful flamboyancy, the assertive archaism of the theatre, neat, shining, obtrusive as a new pin. The armoured figures on the stairs and in the long oaken hall now carried electric lamps in their mailed fists, and this combination of practical modern contrivance with respect for antiquity was not only typical of all the other improvements but also a ceaseless matter of pride to the new owners of Restormel. Their complacence and their contrivance were equally characteristic. The same spirit pervaded the house and made it spick and span, bristling with expensive conveniences from attic to cellar. The long parlour in which Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright now stood in expectation of her guests was a great low room panelled in oak, with leaded casements of dim glass. At least, this is what it had been. Now it had Art-Nouveau windows with cushioned seats, and a broad white cornice, behind whose rim lurked electric lights in plutocratic abundance, shedding a pale, diffused glare, as of a ghostly day. The scene they shone on was no longer ancient, but ‘antique.’
Everything was overdone; everything was in that strenuous good taste which is the worst taste of all. The oaken settles, so carved, so polished, were blatantly unconvincing in their very eagerness to convince; oaken tables here and there carried silver photograph-frames and silver bowls of roses. In their devout attempt to preserve inviolate the antiquity of the house, the Hoope-Arkwrights had scorned the introduction of a carpet, and the expanse of the floor was now an artificial skating-rink of parquet, so new and glossy that it might have served as a mirror, over whose surface were scattered a few desolate islets of rug that slid treacherously away beneath unwary feet, carrying their victim in a helpless slide across the room. Under the tables sat monstrous great green china cats, painted all over with little roses in patterns and ribbons. Their emerald eyes of glass glared grimly forth from each lair, and their presence added a neat note of modern art to the pristine simplicity of the other decorations.