That afternoon we went to tea with Mr. Pye.
Mr. Pye was an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of period furniture.
He lived at Prior's Lodge in the grounds of which were the ruins of the old Priory dissolved at the Reformation.
It was hardly a man's house.
The curtains and cushions were of pastel shades in the most expensive silks.
Mr. Pye's small plump hands quivered with excitement as he described and exhibited his treasures, and his voice rose to a falsetto squeak as he narrated the exciting circumstances in which he had brought his Italian bedstead home from Verona.
Joanna and I, both being fond of antiques, met with approval.
"It is really a pleasure, a great pleasure, to have such an acquisition to our little community.
The dear good people down here, you know, so painfully bucolic - not to say provincial.
Vandals - absolute vandals!
And the insides of their houses - it would make you weep, dear lady, I assure you it would make you weep.
Perhaps it has done so?"
Joanna said she hadn't gone quite as far as that.
"The house you have taken," went on Mr. Pye, "Miss Emily Barton's house. Now that is charming, and she has some quite nice pieces.
Quite nice.
One or two of them are really first-class.
And she has taste, too - although I'm not quite so sure of that as I was.
Sometimes, I am afraid, I think it's really sentiment.
She likes to keep things as they were - but not for 'le bon motif' - not because of the resultant harmony - but because it is the way her mother had them."
He transferred his attention to me, and his voice changed.
It altered from that of the rapt artist to that of the born gossip:
"You didn't know the family at all?
No, quite so - yes, through house agents.
But, my dears, you ought to have known that family!
When I came here the old mother was still alive.
An incredible person - quite incredible!
A monster, if you know what I mean. Positively a monster.
The old-fashioned Victorian monster, devouring her young.
Yes, that's what it amounted to.
She was monumental, you know, must have weighed seventeen stone, and all the five daughters revolved around her.
'The girls!'
That's how she always spoke of them. The girls!
And the eldest was well over sixty then."
"'Those stupid girls!' she used to call them sometimes.
Black slaves, that's all they were, fetching and carrying and agreeing with her.
Ten o'clock they had to go to bed and they weren't allowed a fire in their bedroom, and as for asking their own friends to the house, that would have been unheard of.
She despised them, you know, for not getting married, and yet so arranged their lives that it was practically impossible for them to meet anybody.
I believe Emily, or perhaps it was Agnes, did have some kind of affair with a curate. But his family wasn't good enough and Mamma soon put a stop to that!"
"It sounds like a novel," said Joanna.
"Oh, my dear, it was.
And then the dreadful old woman died, but of course, it was far too late then.
They just went on living there and talking in hushed voices about what poor Mamma would have wished. Even re-papering her bedroom they felt to be quite sacrilegious.
Still they did enjoy themselves in the parish in a quiet way... But none of them had much stamina, and they just died off one by one.
Influenza took off Edith, and Minnie had an operation and didn't recover and poor Mable had a stroke - Emily looked after her in the most devoted manner.
Really that poor woman has done nothing but nursing for the last ten years.
A charming creature, don't you think?
Like a piece of Dresden.
So sad for her having financial anxieties - but of course, all investments have depreciated."
"We feel rather awful being in her house," said Joanna.
"No, no, my dear young lady. You mustn't feel that way.