Masters of the Wheat-Lands by Harold Bindloss

The next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar. He looked about him with quiet interest. He had now and then passed a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect than a mere appeal to the material side of his nature. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.

The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets and tinted walls formed a harmony of soft coloring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. A row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room. Looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad graveled terrace, which was evidently raked smooth every day, and a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed stood upon its pillared wall. From the middle of the terrace a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond the lawn clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.