The old brick floor of the stable he replaced with handmade tiles. The
box-stalls were small display-rooms, hung with tapestries and lighted
with candles in old French sconces. The great carriage-room became a
refectory, with Jacobean and old monastery chairs, and the vast loft
overhead, reached by a narrow staircase that clung to the wall, was
railed on its exposed side, waxed as to floor, hung with lanterns, and
became a ballroom.
Natalie worked with him, spending much time and a prodigious amount of
energy. There was springing up between them one of those curious and
dangerous intimacies, of idleness on the woman's part, of admiration
on the man's, which sometimes develop into a wholly spurious passion.
Probably Rodney realized it; certainly Natalie did not. She liked his
admiration; she dressed, each day, for Rodney's unfailing comment on her
clothes.
"Clay never notices what I wear," she said, once, plaintively.
So it was Rodney who brought Audrey Valentine out of her seclusion,
and he did it by making her angry. He dropped in to see her between
Christmas and New-years, and made a plea.
"A stable-warming!" she said. "How interesting! And fancy dress! Are you
going to have them come as grooms, or jockeys? If I were going I'd go
as a circus-rider. I used to be able to stand up on a running horse. Of
course you're having horses. What's a stable without a horse?"
He saw she was laughing at him and was rather resentful.
"I told you I have made it into a studio."
But when he implored her to go, she was obdurate.
"Do go away and let me alone, Rodney," she said at last. "I loathe
fancy-dress parties."
"It won't be a party without you."
"Then don't have it. I've told you, over and over, I'm not going out. It
isn't decent this year, in my opinion. And, anyhow, I haven't any money,
any clothes, any anything. A bad evening at bridge, and I shouldn't be
able to pay my rent."
"That's nonsense. Why do you let people say you are moping about Chris?
You're not."
"Of course not."
She sat up.
"What else are they saying?"
"Well, there's some talk, naturally. You can't be as popular as you have
been, and then just drop out, without some gossip. It's not bad."
"What sort of talk?"
He was very uncomfortable.
"Well, of course, you have been pretty strong on the war stuff?"
"Oh, they think I sent him!"