black table in the centre, an oak settee by the open fireplace, a
couple of Persian rugs on the polished floor. The room had its
quaintness, too, such as she had alluded to in her memorable essay read
before the Riseholme Literary Society, called "Humour in Furniture,"
and a brass milkcan served as a receptacle for sticks and umbrellas.
Equally quaint was the dish of highly realistic stone fruit that stood
beside the pot-pourri and the furry Japanese spider that sprawled in a
silk web over the window.

Such was the fearful verisimilitude of this that Lucia's new housemaid
had once fled from her duties in the early morning, to seek the
assistance of the gardener in killing it. The dish of stone fruit had
scored a similar success, for once she had said to Georgie Pillson,
"Ah, my gardener has sent in some early apples and pears, won't you
take one home with you?" It was not till the weight of the pear (he
swiftly selected the largest) betrayed the joke that he had any notion
that they were not real ones. But then Georgie had had his revenge, for
waiting his opportunity he had inserted a real pear among those stony
specimens and again passing through with Lucia, he picked it out, and
with lips drawn back had snapped at it with all the force of his jaws.
For the moment she had felt quite faint at the thought of his teeth
crashing into fragments.... These humorous touches were altered from
time to time; the spider for instance might be taken down and replaced
by a china canary in a Chippendale cage, and the selection of the
entrance hall for those whimsicalities was intentional, for guests
found something to smile at, as they took off their cloaks and entered
the drawing room with a topic on their lips, something light, something
amusing about what they had seen. For the gong similarly was sometimes
substituted a set of bells that had once decked the collar of the
leading horse in a waggoner's team somewhere in Flanders; in fact when