The house with no address Author:Edith Nesbit Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE HOUSE WITH NO ADDRESS If Mr. Templar could have had his wish and could have gone home with Sylvia he would have gone to a house that had no... more » address. He would have entered it, following Sylvia and two others, by a very odd and unusual way, and he would have found himself in a series of rooms opening one from the other by draped arches, and forming together three sides of a rather large square. The rooms were furnished with an almost savage simplicity; the floors were bare and scrubbed—In the first of the rooms there were rugs and carpets—the uncostly Japanese kind, some comfortable square chairs and couches, useful tables, bookshelves, books. But the effect of severity was at once marred and emphasised by a number of more or less ornamental objects, such as one finds in the houses of people who are rich and not newly rich— the carved, embroidered, lacquered and inlaid adornments of a well-ordered, middle-class home, surviving from the mid-Victorian period. A set of carved ivory chessmen, a banner screen, a good deal of fine old silver, andSheffield plate—cushions covered in Berlin woolwork, Chinese lacquer the like of which you shall never find at Liberty's, an Empire clock with cupids and a half-impudent Venus half-decorously draped in flowing lines of gilt and ormolu. Work-boxes, desks and a blotting book of papier mache inlaid with mother of pearl and sheathed with discoloured gilding. A Buhl cabinet: in it and on it old china set out with an obvious pride. There were little footstools of the kind that only linger in families where the house has not been disturbed for at least two generations, portraits on the walls —some half-dozen in heavy scrolly gilt frames. No other pictures. A low Eugenie chair of carved walnut and Aubusson. Portfolios of engraving...« less