The Last Houseparty
“said Miss Quintain.
She had evidently reverted for the moment to the complete self-control, the almost obsessive formality of language, which she tended to use with strangers. This might have been accidental, merely a matter of how she felt that morning, or it might have been her own half-deliberate mode of facing the coming interview. In any case Mr Mason appeared to take no notice. He handed her the buff-coloured file containing Harry’s letter.
“A very pleasant-sounding gentleman,” he... said. “See now why you’re so wrapped up in your gardening. This where he wrote it?”
“Indeed it is.”
Mr Mason looked slowly round the small room as if it had been part of the conducted tour of Snailwood. Though obviously a functioning office with modern telephone, filing cabinets, typewriter and calculator, it did have an odd atmosphere of being organised for display, something like the slightly unsatisfactory look of a room in the house of some once-famous writer, preserved after his death as a memorial but in these days little visited, containing few objects of intrinsic interest, but many of accidental note—the chair in which Chesterton sat on the cat, the pipe-rack mentioned in the letter to Joyce—and some which no working writer would have kept lying around but would have tossed at once in a drawer, such as the gilt quill awarded with some Norwegian literary prize.MoreLess
She had evidently reverted for the moment to the complete self-control, the almost obsessive formality of language, which she tended to use with strangers. This might have been accidental, merely a matter of how she felt that morning, or it might have been her own half-deliberate mode of facing the coming interview. In any case Mr Mason appeared to take no notice. He handed her the buff-coloured file containing Harry’s letter.
“A very pleasant-sounding gentleman,” he... said. “See now why you’re so wrapped up in your gardening. This where he wrote it?”
“Indeed it is.”
Mr Mason looked slowly round the small room as if it had been part of the conducted tour of Snailwood. Though obviously a functioning office with modern telephone, filing cabinets, typewriter and calculator, it did have an odd atmosphere of being organised for display, something like the slightly unsatisfactory look of a room in the house of some once-famous writer, preserved after his death as a memorial but in these days little visited, containing few objects of intrinsic interest, but many of accidental note—the chair in which Chesterton sat on the cat, the pipe-rack mentioned in the letter to Joyce—and some which no working writer would have kept lying around but would have tossed at once in a drawer, such as the gilt quill awarded with some Norwegian literary prize.MoreLess
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