The maid waited. Rowcliffe's absorption was complete.
"Shall I ask her to call again, sir?"
"No. I'll see her. Where is she?"
"In the dining-room, sir."
"Show her into the study."
* * * * *
Nothing could have been more distant and reserved than Rowcliffe's
dining-room. But, to a young woman who had made up her mind that she
didn't want to know anything about him, Rowcliffe's study said too
much. It told her that he was a ferocious and solitary reader; for in
the long rows of book shelves the books leaned slantwise across the
gaps where his hands had rummaged and ransacked. It told her that his
gods were masculine and many--Darwin and Spencer and Haeckel, Pasteur,
Curie and Lord Lister, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman and Bernard
Shaw. Their photogravure portraits hung above the bookcase. He was
indifferent to mere visible luxury, or how could he have endured
the shabby drugget, the cheap, country wall-paper with its design of
dreadful roses on a white watered ground? But the fire in the grate
and the deep arm-chair drawn close to it showed that he loved warmth
and comfort. That his tastes made him solitary she gathered from the
chair's comparatively unused and unworn companion, lurking and sulking
in the corner where it had been thrust aside.
The one window of this room looked to the west upon a little orchard,
gray trunks of apple trees and plum trees against green grass, green
branches against gray stone, gray that was softened in the liquid
autumn air, green that was subtle, exquisite, charmingly austere.
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