The Lake of Wine by Bernard Capes — Read

It is a keen experience of wayfarers that a north-easterly, unlike a south-easterly wind, seldom drops at evenfall; and therefore should it be a leading principle in the ethics of all wise innkeepers to leave a blind or two up when the rasping demon is abroad at sundown. For what an acute accent on numbness is that flash from a ruddy window! What an invitation in it and a suggestion of the purple bead on a glass of mulled wine! A moment before, life had blown chill and astringent -- a hateful, brassy, and unprofitable affair, whose every vile sensation seemed concentrated in the tips of the ears. Now its interests have gleefully enlarged. There grows and blooms an image of a richly-bought experience of a sanded tap-room; of schools of sleek glasses on shelves, their glossy depths, in the red stillness of the fire-glow, slumberous with ruby, as if a memory of the good warm stuff they had known yet coloured all their dreams; of sturdy kegs, each with an amber drop tremulous on the nozzle of its tap, and its sides pregnant with jollity; of bowls of sugar; of pimpled lemons; of the comfortable purr of a kettle on the hob; of the essence of all of these rising in a fragrant steam that shall moisten the very drought of the heart and send it singing on its way.

Betty Pollack, the daughter and granddaughter of innkeepers, had the right comfortable instinct in this respect; and when the cry of the wind came under the door-sill like a wolf's howl, she knew the demon flew from the north-east, and would order her plans accordingly.