But if the
picture without were depressing, the picture within was always good to
look upon, for those oak-panelled or tapestried rooms, communicating by
richly-curtained doorways from drawing room to library, from library to
billiard room, were as perfect as wealth and taste could make them. Lady
Maulevrier argued that as there was but one house among all the
possessions of her race which she cared to inhabit, she had a right to
make that house beautiful, and she had spared nothing upon the
beautification of Fellside; and yet she had spent much less than would
have been squandered by any pleasure-loving dowager, restlessly roving
from Piccadilly to the Engadine, from Pontresina to Nice or Monaco,
winding up with Easter in Paris, and then back to Piccadilly. Her
ladyship's friends wondered that she could care to bury herself alive in
Westmoreland, and expatiated on the eccentricity of such a life; nay,
those who had never seen Fellside argued that Lady Maulevrier had taken
in her old age to hoarding, and that she pigged at a cottage in the Lake
district, in order to swell a fortune which young Maulevrier would set
about squandering as soon as she was in her coffin.
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