Read Online Mrs. Ames by E. F. Benson - Free Book Online

drawing room, though usually she went to bed as soon as her guests had gone.
    â€˜Very pleasant evening, my dear,’ he said, ‘and your plan was a great success. Uncommonly agreeable woman Mrs Evans is. Pretty woman, too; you would never guess she was the mother of that great girl.’
    â€˜She was not considered pretty as a girl,’ said his wife.
    â€˜No? Then she must have improved in looks afterwards. Lonely life rather, to be a doctor’s wife, with your husband liable to be called away at any hour of the day or night.’
    â€˜I have no doubt Millie occupies herself very well,’ said Mrs Ames. ‘Goodnight, Lyndhurst. Are you coming up to bed?’
    â€˜Not just yet. I shall sit up a bit, and smoke another cigar.’
    He sat in the window, and every now and then found himself saying half aloud, ‘Uncommonly agreeable woman.’ Just overhead Harry was tearing passion to shreds in the style (more or less) of Swinburne.

D R EVANS was looking out of the window of his dining room as he waited the next morning for breakfast to be brought in, jingling a pleasant mixture of money and keys in his trouser pockets and whistling a tune that sounded vague and De Bussy-like until you perceived that it was really an air familiar to streets and barrel organs, and owed its elusive quality merely to the fact that the present performer was a little uncertain as to the comparative value of tones and semitones. But this slightly discouraging detail was more than compensated for by the evident cheerfulness of the executant; his plump, high-coloured face, his merry eye, the singular content of his whole aspect be tokened a personality that was on excellent terms with life.
    His surroundings were as well furnished and securely comfortable as himself. The table was invitingly laid; a Sheffield-plate urn (Dr Evans was an amateur in Georgian decoration and furniture) hissed and steamed with little upliftings of the lid under the pressure within, and a number of hot dishes suggested an English interpretation of breakfast. Fine mezzotints after the great Englishportrait-painters hung on the walls, and a Chippendale sideboard was spread with fruit dishes and dessert plates. The morning was very hot, but the high, spacious room, with its thick walls, was cool and fresh, while its potentialities for warmth and cosiness in the winter were sponsored for by the large open fireplace and the stack of hot-water pipes which stood beneath the sideboard. Outside, the windows at which Dr Evans stood looked out on to the large and secluded lawn, which had been the scene of the garden party the day before. Red brick walls ran along the two sides of it at right angles to the house; opposite, a row of espaliered fruit trees screened off the homeliness of the kitchen garden beyond, and the railway cutting which formed the boundary of this pleasant place.
    Wilfred Evans had whistled the first dozen bars of the ‘Merry Widow Waltz’ some six or seven times through, before, with the retarded consciousness that it was Sunday, he went on to ‘The Church’s One Foundation,’ and though, with his usual admirable appetite, he felt the allure of the hot dishes, he waited, still whistling, for some other member of his household, wife or daughter, to appear. He was one of the most gregarious and club-bable of men, and no hecatomb of stalled oxen would have given him content, if he had had to eat his beef alone. A firm attachment to his domestic circle, combined with the not very exacting calls of his practice, but truly fervent investigations in the laboratory at the end of the garden, of the habits and economy of phagocytes, comfortably filled up, to the furthest horizon, the scenery of his mental territories.
    He had not to wait long for his wife to appear, and he hailed her with his wonted cordiality.
    â€˜Morning, little woman,’ he said. ‘Slept well, I hope?’
    Mrs Evans did not practise at