CHAPTER VII.
AT THE TOP OF THE FASHION.
Nothing could have been more cordial than Lady Fareham's welcome to her
sister, nor were it easy to imagine a life more delightful than that at
Chilton Abbey in that autumnal season, when every stage of the decaying
year clothed itself with a variety and brilliancy of colouring which made
ruin beautiful, and disguised the approach of winter, as a court harridan
might hide age and wrinkles under a yellow satin mask and flame-coloured
domino. The Abbey was one of those capacious, irregular buildings in which
all that a house was in the past and all that it is in the present are
composed into a harmonious whole, and in which past and present are so
cunningly interwoven that it would have been difficult for any one but an
architect to distinguish where the improvements and additions of yesterday
were grafted on to the masonry of the fourteenth century. Here, where the
spacious plate-room and pantry began, there were walls massive enough for
the immuring of refractory nuns; and this corkscrew Jacobean staircase,
which wound with carved balusters up to the garret story, had its
foundations in a flight of Cyclopean stone steps that descended to the
cellars, where the monks kept their strong liquors and brewed their beer.
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