THE HOUSE TALKED.

The objects in it talked, too-chairs, tables, couches, a big, squashy hassock that squatted obscenely in a corner of the bedroom. But the voice of the house was loudest. It was a thin, high voice, like that of an old woman. Hunched on its hill, like a fat old woman crouching on her haunches, its wings spread out like the folds of a ragged skirt, its wide terrace apronlike, its tower a thin neck, wattled and scaled with lichen, the house talked. Sometimes it said, Run away…leave him…if you can. Sometimes it wailed, I wish he’d die…

Sometimes its suggestion was more direct.

Gordon didn’t tell her that there would be a guest until just before dinner. Linda was sitting at her dressing table, elbows carelessly asprawl on the polished glass top. In the tall triple mirrors, her bedroom looked strange-not like a reflection of reality, but like another room, all the more disturbing because it contained the same furniture as her room, in the same positions, and yet looked subtly wrong. Like hers, it was decorated in shades of blue and white-cool, virginal colors, restful and remote. The drapes framing the tall windows were the deep, rich blue of the sky at late evening; their heavy velvet did not reflect light, but drank it in and absorbed it, so that the hoarded gold gave the blue a glowing luster. Because she had expressed a dislike for wall-to-wall carpeting, Gordon had had the floors redone; they were stained dark, unvarnished but shining like black glass with repeated applications of wax. Glass, or black water… The scattered rugs lay like little icebergs on a dark sea. Now, reflected, the ragged white islands seemed to move, rocking slightly as if shifted by the dark, shimmery surface on which they lay.