Publisher's Synopsis
They have been groping their way forward, blissfully unaware of how they shall begroping there again more terribly before the night is out. Some one finds a switch, and the room is illumined, with the effect that the garden seems to have drawnback a step as if worsted in the first encounter. But it is only waiting.The apparently inoffensive chamber thus suddenly revealed is, for a bachelor'shome, creditably like a charming country house drawing-room and abounds in thelittle feminine touches that are so often best applied by the hand of man. There isnothing in the room inimical to the ladies, unless it be the cut flowers which arefrom the garden and possibly in collusion with it. The fireplace may also be a littledubious. It has been hacked out of a thick wall which may have been there whenthe other walls were not, and is presumably the cavern where Lob, when alone, sitschatting to himself among the blue smoke. He is as much at home by this fire as anygnome that may be hiding among its shadows; but he is less familiar with the rest ofthe room, and when he sees it, as for instance on his lonely way to bed, he oftenstares long and hard at it before chuckling uncomfortably.There are five ladies, and one only of them is elderly, the Mrs. Coade whom a voicein the darkness has already proclaimed the nicest. She is the nicest, though thevoice was no good judge. Coady, as she is familiarly called and as her husband alsois called, each having for many years been able to answer for the other, is a roundedold lady with a beaming smile that has accompanied her from childhood. If she livesto be a hundred she will pretend to the census man that she is only ninety-nine.She has no other vice that has not been smoothed out of existence by her placidlife, and she has but one complaint against the male Coady, the rather odd one thathe has long forgotten his first wife. Our Mrs. Coady never knew the first one but itis she alone who sometimes looks at the portrait of her and preserves in their homecertain mementoes of her, such as a lock of brown hair, which the equally gentlemale Coady must have treasured once but has now forgotten. The first wife hadbeen slightly lame, and in their brief married life he had carried solicitously a restfor her foot, had got so accustomed to doing this, that after a quarter of a centurywith our Mrs. Coady he still finds footstools for her as if she were lame also. She hasceased to pucker her face over this, taking it as a kind little thoughtless attention, and indeed with the years has developed a friendly lim
