Paying Guests by E.F. Benson — Read

The full and glorious noon of the Green Salon had evidently passed: collectors who were anxious to secure Howards for their galleries must have satisfied themselves, and when, on the morning of the day preceding its closing, neither visitors nor purchasers had entered its pictured walls the friends decided to occupy the remainder of the hours in beginning the packing of the works with little red stars on them. The pill box with these brevets inside was now found to be unaccountably empty, and the custodian when pressed acknowledged that, despairing of employing them for their ordained purpose, he had used them up (so that they should not be wasted) by affixing to the wall behind the door his own initials executed in red stars. There indeed his initials were, and Alice and Florence had to spend a considerable time in soaking them off. That was a matter of difficulty for they proved to be of first rate adhesive quality. But it was done now, and Florence in her homespun Norfolk jacket with no hat had hurried off into the town to purchase strong corrugated cardboard and brown paper.

Alice was feeling on edge: she had spent a sticky hour in detaching the custodian's odious initials, she was disappointed that the last few days of the Green Salon had been fruitless and she was worried over the deception she had been driven to practise on Florence about the ancestral home. That figured itself to her as a black hole in the fabric of life out of which at any moment might pop out something surprisingly unpleasant. So while her friend had gone on her useful errand, she had nagged at the custodian (on the lines of a wage-earning man behaving like a child) for giving them so much trouble and the custodian had grown sulky and sat perched on his stool like a ruffled bird in livery with the pip, instead of the brightest boy in Bolton. Yet after all the exhibition had been a great success, and she thought with fortitude how narrowly she had escaped acting on the diabolical counsel of the young man from the Bolton Gazette, who had criticised her pictures without ever seeing them, and had advised her to put a quantity of stars on virgin frames in order to encourage purchasers. She had nearly done so: had it not been for Tim and Mrs. Holders and those mysterious ladies and gentlemen about whom the custodian could remember nothing, she would surely have fallen. Nowadays she knew something of the tangled web of deceit over her fabulous ancestral home, and she was thankful to have been spared further complications over the Green Salon. If she had succumbed, she would now be in the power of the sulky custodian.