Phyllis Bottome

“ Inside—they got in quite easily through an unlatched window—was a kitchen where the inhabitants had always lived. It was black with venerable age and smoke and generous sheltering. It was just the kind of kitchen Fanny liked. It shared the floor with a small, stiff, chilly parlor, a dreadful place of wool mats, china dogs, and angular, unnatural shells. A revised form of step-ladder led to an upper story.
There were three rooms ("It's quite a large cottage!" Fanny exclaimed triumphantly) , a double room, the size of the Derings' bath-room; and one that Geoffrey mistook for a cupboard. ”

“ In fact, it was just the kind of cottage the Derings would be sure to like. It was called "The Nest." He told himself savagely as he banged the gate on the scarlet tulips that it would be too ridiculous to expect the Derlngs to take Fanny's absurd cottage. Why on earth should they? This, of course, was what he was being savage about, not because he knew they would n't.
Emily was to come down in June to settle the matter. She would stay at a hotel on the hill above St. Ives, a beautiful hotel, once a private house. There was a wood on the grounds which was, in the spring, like romance itself. ”

“ And there was the one Fanny liked best, of the cottage itself, with her standing under the apple-tree; only she had scolded Geoffrey for not having put in the pump.
There was something in all those pictures which Emily had never seen in Geoffrey's work before—a certain ruggedness and virility that was n't at all pretty.
"You have n't made her half as beautiful or half as sad as she really is," Emily complained as she ate the splits and cream. "I don't mean the pictures are n't wonderful; but somehow I 've always seen Fanny differently. ”