"But just now you said you would give anything for a couple of unemployed hours this afternoon," said Ruby.
"I know, because the flesh was weak, and I was very hungry and dog-tired. I feel better now--nearly ready to begin again."
Ruby turned her pale Botticelli face towards her.
"How you can go on, I don't know," she said. "You play all the time we play, and work all the time we rest. You make me feel lazy too, which I resent."
"Darling, I will make you feel industrious this afternoon," said Catherine, "because I want you and Jim to stop here, and criticise and alter and direct till the ballroom and this room and the staircase are all absolutely perfect. You know what I want done: I want you to see that it is done. Don't judge by daylight only. Have the blinds and curtains drawn, and see that it looks right by electric light. I shall not be able to get home till just before dinner, and then it will be too late. English decorators are hopeless; they know as much about decoration as I know about the lunar theory. I wonder they haven't sent some plush monkeys climbing up into spiders' webs to hang in the windows."
"They sent hundreds of yellow calceolarias," said Ruby, "which is about as bad. I sent them all back. And poor Mr. Hopkinson didn't seem to know what wild-flowers were, when I told him you wanted wild-flowers all up the staircase."
It was probable that poor Mr. Hopkinson did "know now," for ever since morning tall flowering grasses, meadow-sweet, cornflowers, cistus, ox-eye daisies, tendrils of wild-rose, clumps of buttercups, and all the myriad herbage of rural June, had been poured into the house, and the staircase, with great boughs of hawthorn and rose overhanging the lowlier growths, was like an apotheosised lane lying between ribands of shaded hayfield. Lady Thurso, inheriting the American love of doing something which has never been done before, a thing which leads to failure in a dozen cases, and hits the bull's-eye on the lucky thirteenth, had never been better inspired, and the staircase, a rather heavy and not very admirable feature in the house, had been gloriously transformed by the lightness and spring of this feathery decoration. But poor Mr. Hopkinson's ignorance of what wild-flowers were had been capped by his ignorance of how wild-flowers grew, and the original order to decorate the stairs with only wild-flowers had led to his placing the poor dears in neat and orderly rows, as in a riband bed. Consequently, he and his assistant florists had, about twelve-thirty that morning, to demolish and begin all over again, having first, under Lady Thurso's supervision, "made a salad" of all these fragrant hampers of flowers and grasses, and then stuck them "properly"--that is to say, absolutely at random--into the trays of moist clay and troughs of water that lined each side of the staircase, which would keep them alive and bright-eyed till morning.