She looked in at the various doors casually as she passed up and down the stairs,--all save that of the dining-room, which Francesca had prudently locked to conceal the fact that we had covered the family portraits,--and I noticed at the time that her face wore an expression of mingled grief and astonishment. It seemed to us afterward that there was a good deal more passing up and down the loaning than when we first arrived. At dusk especially, small processions of children and young people walked by our cottage and gave shy glances at the windows.
Finding Miss Grieve in an unusually amiable mood, I inquired the probable cause of this phenomenon. She would not go so far as to give any judicial opinion, but offered a few conjectures.
It might be the tirling-pin; it might be the white satin ribbons on the curtains; it might be the guitars and banjos; it might be the bicycle crate; it might be the profusion of plants; it might be the continual feasting and revelry; it might be the blazing fires in a Pettybaw summer. She thought a much more likely reason, however, was because it had become known in the village that we had moved every stick of furniture in the house out of its accustomed place and taken the dressing-tables away from the windows,--"thae windys," she called them.
I discussed this matter fully with Mr. Anstruther later on. He laughed heartily, but confessed, with an amused relish of his national conservatism, that to his mind there certainly was something radical, advanced, and courageous in taking a dressing-table away from its place, back to the window, and putting it anywhere else in a room. He would be frank, he said, and acknowledge that it suggested an undisciplined and lawless habit of thought, a disregard for authority, a lack of reverence for tradition, and a riotous and unbridled imagination.
This view of the matter gave us exquisite enjoyment. "But why?" I asked laughingly. "The dressing-table is not a sacred object, even to a woman. Why treat it with such veneration? Where there is but one good light, and that immediately in front of the window, there is every excuse for the British custom, but when the light is well diffused, why not place the table wherever it looks well?"