Then one morning came a letter from Strachan.—He would manage to see me soon somehow, and we could arrange about the Book. He was bound to cross the Channel in any case, he found, before the term began. There were some bones in the Museum of Natural History that he must manage to see somehow before he went on any further with a monograph on the Elephas Primogenius he was now working at. Mrs. Strachan and the girls were not coming to Paris this year. I must excuse haste, and, hoping to see me well, he remained, etc., etc.
What a time that was, furnishing the house! As for the idea of doing each room of the house in a particular style—L'homme propose, les commis disposent! I really don't know how we ever got the place done at all. However, at the end of a fortnight, we, or rather I, again had made five of the seven rooms habitable, and the two servants I had got had done the same for the kitchen. (The servants of the whole house slept up above in the grenier, as they call it, not in the several flats.) I worked like a slave, and rather liked it: hanging all the pictures, deciding where, and generally helping, to put all the things in their places, and so on; for I had my doubts about the Parisian sense of the beautiful in the matter of furniture arrangement.
Rosy's chief anxiety in the matter was as concerned the fate of the things which she had herself ordered, all the linen and the household utensils. She did not care to come up to the place itself, for reasons of her own: not unconnected, I thought, with a small coffin which had happened to be exposed by the door one morning, covered with flowers, a child's coffin. When I had asked her, as we went up the staircase, why she hurried by so quickly, she said in a half-whisper:
'It was a child! Don't let's talk about it.'
It must have been a fine thing in the way of amusement to have seen her ordering her things at the Magasin du Louvre her favourite shop, lists in hand. The composition of those lists in the evenings with pen, ink, paper, and dictionary was delightful; but she would not hear of my going with her to see their fulfilment.
