No. 5 Little Market Street was in Westminster, not far from the river and the Houses of Parliament, yet in a street which looked almost remote, and which was often very quiet although close to great arteries of life.  Dion sometimes thought it almost too dusky a setting for his Rosamund, but it was she who had chosen it, and they had both become quickly fond of it.  It was a house with white paneling, graceful ceilings and carved fireplaces, and a shallow staircase of oak.  There was a tiny but welcoming hall, and the landing on the first floor suggested potpourri, chintz-covered settees, and little curtains of chintz moved by a country wind coming through open windows.  There were, in fact, chintz-covered settees, and there was potpourri.  Rosamund had taken care about that; she had also taken care about many other little things which most London housewives, perhaps, think unworthy of their attention.  Every day, for instance, she burnt lavender about the house, and watched the sweet smoke in tiny wreaths curling up from the small shovel, as she gently moved it to and fro, with a half smile of what she called “rustic satisfaction.”  She laid lavender in the cupboards and in the chests of drawers, and, when she bought flowers, chose by preference cottage garden flowers, if she could get them, sweet williams, pansies, pinks, wallflowers, white violets, stocks, Canterbury bells.  Sometimes she came home with wild flowers, and had once given a little dinner with foxgloves for a table decoration.  An orchid, a gardenia, even a hyacinth, was never to be seen in the little house.  Rosamund confessed that hyacinths had a lovely name, and that they suggested spring, but she added that they smelt as if they had always lived in hothouses, and were quite ready to be friends with gardenias.

She opened her windows.  In this she was almost too rigorous for her maid-servants, who nevertheless adored her.  “Plenty of warmth but plenty of air,” was her prescription for a comfortable and healthy house, “and not too much or too many of anything.”  Dust, of course, was not to be known of in her dwelling, but “blacks” were accepted with a certain resignation as a natural chastening and a message from London.  “They aren’t our fault, Annie,” she had been known to observe to the housemaid.  “And dust can’t be anything else, however you look at it, can it?” And Annie said, “Well, no, ma’am!” and, when she came to think of it, felt she had not been a liar in the moment of speaking.

Rosamund never “splashed,” or tried to make a show in her house, and she was very careful never to exceed their sufficient, but not large, income; but the ordinary things, those things which of necessity come into the scheme of everyday life, were always of the very best when she provided them.  Dion declared, and really believed, perhaps with reason, that no tea was so fragrant, no bread and butter so delicious, no toast so crisp, as theirs; no other linen felt so cool and fresh to the body as the linen