“It is quite a treat to sit in them,” Prescott said.
“Yes,” Frank answered, puffing out his smoke with an air of extreme contentment. “I flatter myself that they approach as nearly to perfect comfort as it is possible for anything earthly to do. I do love an easy chair. I remember when I was a child I used to be tortured, not as a punishment, mind, but as a regular thing—tortured by having to sit on a high-legged, straight-backed chair, with a seat no bigger than a cheese-plate, so that you could neither lean forward nor backward. How my unfortunate little back used to ache! I really wonder that my spine ever grew straight. At other times, when not in that terrible little chair, I had to sit bolt upright, and it was a penal offence to loll, as my grandmother called it, or in any way to approach a comfortable attitude.”
“It was nearly as bad in my case, Frank,” Prescott said. “I believe our fathers had a vague idea that unless we sat perfectly upright, our spine would become irretrievably crooked, whereas I really believe the reverse to be nearer the fact. I feel certain that many a man and woman with a curved spine and broken health has nothing but those atrocious chairs and the miserable stiff attitudes they had to sit in as children to thank for their misfortunes.”
“If our ancestors had but used their common sense,” Frank said, “which with respect to the treatment of their children they never seem to have done, they would have seen that the straightest and best formed people in the world, the Arabs of the Desert, and I may add the North American Indians—as they used to be, before they were improved off the face of the earth—never sat on a chair in their lives, but always either lay at full length, or squatted on the ground with their backs in a bow.
“Halloa!” he broke off; “there’s a single knock at the door; I wonder who that can be, I have not ordered anything that I know of.”
So saying he got up and went to the outer door. A boy was standing there.
“Please, sir, I want to see Mr. Maynard.”
“I am Mr. Maynard,” Frank said; “what do you want?”
“Oh, is it you, Evan? Come in, it is so dark out here I did not know you again. I am glad you have come.”
Frank led the way back again into the sitting-room, followed by Evan, greatly abashed at the splendour of its belongings.