Bits of thick
brown paper pasted over the windows during the hot months still stuck to
the glass. The furniture was heavy, not old but middle-aged, lacking the
charm of antiquity, and in the worst French taste. The pictures were
banal; and there was no garden. More painful than all, the house was in
the Condamine; and Dodo, when she had spent a few days at "Monte" on her
way to England from Australia, had been told that "nobody who was
anybody lived down in the Condamine: only the 'cheap people' went
there." And Dodo did not consider herself a cheap person. She was paying
high to be the guest of a "lady of title": she wanted her money's worth,
and soon began to fear that there was doubt of getting it.
Servants had been engaged in advance for Lady Dauntrey by the agent who
had let the house. There were too few; and it needed but the first
night's dinner to prove that the cook was third rate, though Lady
Dauntrey carefully referred to him as the _chef_. In addition to this
person, occasionally seen flitting about in a dingy white cap, there was
a man to wait at table and open the door--a man, Dodo said, with the
face of a sulky codfish; and a hawk-nosed, hollow-cheeked woman to "do
the rooms" and act as maid to the ladies, none of the three having
brought a maid of her own. Their hostess had said she could not put up
her guests' servants, but they might "count upon a first-rate maid in
the house." They reminded each other of this promise, the day after
their arrival, and grumbled.
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