"I _love_ this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with his back against the door he had just shut.

"Only it makes me long to take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other--plastering, or carpentering, or painting.

What useless drones we upper classes are! Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor--to save our lives." They were in the disused library.

It was now the last room westwards of the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to her English husband's birthplace.

The roof had been raised and domed to match the "Chinese room," at the expense of some small rooms on the upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to eighteenth-century taste.