So he ordered both the doors to be opened and took possession of the suite, pacing them several times, and then measuring their length, and breadth, and height, and the distance between the windows.
Then he inspected the wing on that side of the house, and, going into the yard, looked the building over from all points, occasionally marking a few lines on the paper he held in his hand.

Before noon every room in the house, except the one where Dolly lay sick with a headache had been visited and examined minutely, while Frank watched him nervously, wondering if he would think they had greatly injured anything, or had expended too much money on furniture.

But Arthur was thinking of none of these things, and found fault with nothing except the drain and the gas fixtures, all of which he declared bad, saying that the latter must be changed at once, and that ten pounds of copperas must be bought immediately and put down the drain, and that quantities of chloride of lime and carbolic acid must be placed where there was the least danger of vegetable decomposition.
'I am very sensitive to smells, and afraid of them, too, for they breed malaria and disease of all kinds,' he said to the cook, whose nose and chin both were high in the air, not on account of any obnoxious odor, but because of this unreasonable meddling with what she considered her own affairs.

If things were to go on in this way, she said to the house-maid, and if that man was going to poke his nose into drains, and gas-pipes, and kerosene lamps, and bowls of sour milk which she might have forgotten, she should give notice to quit.
But when, half an hour later, some boxes and trunks which had come by express were deposited in the back hall, and Arthur, who was superintending them, said to her, as he pointed to a large black trunk, 'I think this has the dress patterns and shawls I brought for you, girls; for though I did not know you personally, I knew that women were always pleased with anything from Paris' her feelings underwent a radical change, and Arthur was free to smell the drain and the gas fixtures as much as he liked.
He was very busy, and though always pleasant, and even familiar at times, there was in all he said and did an air of ownership, as if he had assumed the mastership.

And he had.