partition-walls, she had, with the aid of a sympathetic architect,
transmuted them into a most comfortable dwelling, subsequently building
on to them a new wing, that ran at right angles at the back, which was,
if anything, a shade more inexorably Elizabethan than the stem onto
which it was grafted, for here was situated the famous smoking-parlour,
with rushes on the floor, and a dresser ranged with pewter tankards,
and leaded lattice-windows of glass so antique that it was practically
impossible to see out of them. It had a huge open fireplace framed in
oak-beams with a seat on each side of the iron-backed hearth within the
chimney, and a genuine spit hung over the middle of the fire. Here,
though in the rest of the house she had for the sake of convenience
allowed the installation of electric light, there was no such
concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that
only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then
reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained
nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later
than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically
Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often
spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing
on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the
fumes of the wood-fire as with streaming eyes she deciphered an Elzevir
Horace rather late for inclusion under the rule, but an undoubted
bargain.

The house stood at the end of the village that was nearest the station,
and thus, when the panorama of her kingdom opened before her, she had
but a few steps further to go. A yew-hedge, bought entire from a
neighboring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth and
indignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of garden
from the road, and cast monstrous shadows of the shapes into which it