We walked to the summer-house at the very end,
from which a winding path began to climb the hill. There Miss Dudley
paused. "My chamois days are over, for the present, at least," said she.
"We must wait for my little nieces or nephew to escort you up there.
Shall we go in?"
When we did so, I thought that the interior of the cottage was not much
less grand, scarcely less beautiful, than what we had seen without. At
that period most housekeepers held the hardly yet exploded heresy, not
only that fresh air was a dangerous and unwholesome luxury, to be
denied, as far as might be, to any but the strongest constitutions,[2]
but that even sunshine within the doors was an inadmissible intrusion,
alike untidy and superfluous. On these points this house set public
opinion at defiance. It was set, of set purpose, at _wrong_ angles to
the points of the compass. Every wind of heaven could sweep it, at the
pleasure of the inmates, through and through, and the piazzas were so
arranged that there was not a single apartment in it into which the sun
could not look, through one window or another, once at least in the
twenty-four hours. The floors were tiled, ingrained, oiled,
matted,--everything but carpeted, except that of the state drawing-room;
and there the Wilton had a covering over it, removed, as I afterwards
found, only on occasions of state.
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