The dish of stone fruit had
scored a similar success, for once she had said to Georgie Pillson,
"Ah, my gardener has sent in some early apples and pears, won't you
take one home with you?" It was not till the weight of the pear (he
swiftly selected the largest) betrayed the joke that he had any notion
that they were not real ones. But then Georgie had had his revenge, for
waiting his opportunity he had inserted a real pear among those stony
specimens and again passing through with Lucia, he picked it out, and
with lips drawn back had snapped at it with all the force of his jaws.
For the moment she had felt quite faint at the thought of his teeth
crashing into fragments.... These humorous touches were altered from
time to time; the spider for instance might be taken down and replaced
by a china canary in a Chippendale cage, and the selection of the
entrance hall for those whimsicalities was intentional, for guests
found something to smile at, as they took off their cloaks and entered
the drawing room with a topic on their lips, something light, something
amusing about what they had seen. For the gong similarly was sometimes
substituted a set of bells that had once decked the collar of the
leading horse in a waggoner's team somewhere in Flanders; in fact when
Lucia was at home there was often a new little quaintness for quite a
sequence of days, and she had held out hopes to the Literary Society
that perhaps some day, when she was not so rushed, she would jot down
material for a sequel to her essay, or write another covering a rather
larger field on "The Gambits of Conversation Derived from Furniture.
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