Love & Mrs. Sargent by Patrick Dennis Read Free Book Online

and—again—thank you.”
    With long, rapid strides, Sheila was halfway to the front door before they could protest.
    “Isn’t she a darling,” Mrs. McCarthy said to her friend. “Such a lady and so utterly, utterly sincere.”
    “Just between you and I, Maureen,” her companion said, “I think she was better than Bishop Sheen.”

VIII.
     
    Farthest flung of the buildings on the Sargent place was the tool shed. Seventy or eighty years ago, when the place was new and run as a very small and by no means self-sustaining farm, the tool shed had housed garden tools. When Sheila had taken over the place, a large window had been cut into the shed’s south wall and Sheila had entertained a wan hope of raising there a few orchids and gardenias with, perhaps, a camellia tree or so. The notion had been a fetching one, but Sheila had had no knack with flowers and, before too many hundred of dollars’ worth of plants had been killed by her loving ministrations, the project was abandoned. After the children were born, the tool shed became a play house where, it was fondly hoped, Dicky and Allison would hold sedate nursery teas for their little friends and thus spare the main house. That idea died a-borning when Bertha, paying a surprise visit with Ovaltine and ginger snaps, had interrupted a game of strip poker involving the children ofsome of the finest families in Lake Forest. The place was then fitted up as a workshop when Dicky had been interested in building things. And, after he had built a smallish snipe, the tool shed functioned as a boat house until Dicky and the craft capsized in a sudden storm on Lake Michigan. Only Mrs. Flood, who spoke of the place now as “Dicky’s Studio,” had ever called it anything except the tool shed and it had never been markedly successful in sheltering much more than a few hoes and rakes.
    But now that Dicky was home from college, now that he had published a novel and had a career, the tool shed had undergone its most rigorous renovation.
    Advised by the young architect who had erected the breeze-ways, Sheila had done over the tool shed as a surprise for her son when it had been fairly definitely decided that he would become a writer like his father before him. The walls had been refinished in a soft blue (”for tranquility”), with a large expanse of platinum walnut paneling (”for warmth”). Dicky’s father’s old desk—smartly bleached—and his grandfather’s Sheffield inkstand— lacquered against tarnish—lent, as the architect said, “tradi tion.” An old Worcester mug—”amusing and colorful”—was filled with freshly sharpened pencils.
    The paneled wall was nicely tricked out with shelves to hold the tools of a writers trade— The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fowlers Modern English Usage, a Merriam-Webster New In ternational Dictionary, a Cosmopolitan World Atlas, Roget’s International Thesaurus, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the com plete works of Sheila Sargent bound in blue suede and the works of Richard Sargent p ere in pale calf. Quite a lot of shelf space had been left bare for the coming works of Richard Sargent, junior. An impressive series of panels also burst open to reveal an electric typewriter (blue), an electric pencil sharpener, hi-fi and concealed television, for the architect also considered himself something of a specialist in “the economy of space.”
    On the cork floor (”for quiet”) was a sculptured beige rug (”for area interest”), surrounded by some comfortable chairs upholstered in tortoise shell leather and a blue tweed convertible sofa, matching exactly the blue of the walls and the Roman blinds. The place, finished off with some Regency lamps, a few modern tables, an antique map of the Bahamas and some prints of Napoleonic guardsmen in tortoise shell mats, was finally pronounced a “fine, masculine workroom for a writer” by the archi tect who knew nothing of writing and even less of masculinity.
    Sensing that Mrs.