'I am just going to practise. I open my office on the first of January next,' he answered.
'You would not mind having me as a client--your first client?' She looked curiously from her sideway face across the table as she said this.
'Can you ask it!' said Somerset warmly. 'What are you going to build?'
'I am going to restore the castle.'
'What, all of it?' said Somerset, astonished at the audacity of such an undertaking.
'Not the parts that are absolutely ruinous: the walls battered by the Parliament artillery had better remain as they are, I suppose. But we have begun wrong; it is I who should ask you, not you me.... I fear,' she went on, in that low note which was somewhat difficult to catch at a distance, 'I fear what the antiquarians will say if I am not very careful. They come here a great deal in summer and if I were to do the work wrong they would put my name in the papers as a dreadful person. But I must live here, as I have no other house, except the one in London, and hence I must make the place habitable. I do hope I can trust to your judgment?'
'I hope so,' he said, with diffidence, for, far from having much professional confidence, he often mistrusted himself. 'I am a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a Member of the Institute of British Architects--not a Fellow of that body yet, though I soon shall be.'
'Then I am sure you must be trustworthy,' she said, with enthusiasm. 'Well, what am I to do?--How do we begin?'
Somerset began to feel more professional, what with the business chair and the table, and the writing-paper, notwithstanding that these articles, and the room they were in, were hers instead of his; and an evenness of manner which he had momentarily lost returned to him. 'The very first step,' he said, 'is to decide upon the outlay--what is it to cost?'
He faltered a little, for it seemed to disturb the softness of their relationship to talk thus of hard cash. But her sympathy with his feeling was apparently not great, and she said, 'The expenditure shall be what you advise.'
'What a heavenly client!' he thought. 'But you must just give some idea,' he said gently. 'For the fact is, any sum almost may be spent on such a building: five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand.'
'I want it done well; so suppose we say a hundred thousand? My father's solicitor--my solicitor now--says I may go to a hundred thousand without extravagance, if the expenditure is scattered over two or three years.'