...after honeymooning in Italy, visiting friends, the lovely Berensons, ah-that is a story for another day. We settled into married life. Settled, a word that unsettles me, I confess.
"The first months of our return home were spent in settling into our house 32 Grosvenor Road. We went before that to No. 36, a furnished house belonging to Percy Feilding." Doing, Assembling staff and arranging household matters.
Philip went to his office- while I busied myself with decoration and establishment of the house. I would meet Philip for luncheon and in the evenings Philip would read aloud to me-poetry, sometimes Gibbons, sometimes Macaulay's History.
" I had a sitting room on one of the top floors overlooking the river. (the Thames)" Perched so high-it seemed as if I were suspended over the water.
"I loved to watch the blue evening lights and the yellow gas lamps and see the great barges being pulled up the river, the men's figures outlined against the lights."
I filled this room and my boudoir with silk pillows and my many books-
"There was always endless work in arranging our house, which really became very lovely. The drawing room was panelled pale grey, and the curtains a vivid rose-pink Chinese silk."
(designer Veere Greeney's rooms evoke something of a sense of the rooms as they might have been)
"Quite surprising, Philip has had great energy and taste, and devoted himself to making our little house perfect. His taste was so architectural and accurate, at first it was quite bewildering to me, who was not accustomed to so much care in details of furnishing and house decoration,
but I soon learn my lesson and was stimulated to many developments of my own, more romantic and wilder inventions , he curbing and pruning."
Those more romantic ,wilder inventions would return, time and time again at home and in my heart.
(in writing this story-I have used Quotation Marks to indicate OTTOLINE'S Words. All other text is my own-assuming Otts. Voice)
"The first months of our return home were spent in settling into our house 32 Grosvenor Road. We went before that to No. 36, a furnished house belonging to Percy Feilding." Doing, Assembling staff and arranging household matters.
Philip went to his office- while I busied myself with decoration and establishment of the house. I would meet Philip for luncheon and in the evenings Philip would read aloud to me-poetry, sometimes Gibbons, sometimes Macaulay's History.
Gibbon writes
"A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute."
I took this to heart & threw myself into decorating the rooms of No. 32.
from Every Women's Encyclopaedia
Georges Lemmen, Views of the Thames, 1892.
"I loved to watch the blue evening lights and the yellow gas lamps and see the great barges being pulled up the river, the men's figures outlined against the lights."
I filled this room and my boudoir with silk pillows and my many books-
"There was always endless work in arranging our house, which really became very lovely. The drawing room was panelled pale grey, and the curtains a vivid rose-pink Chinese silk."
(designer Veere Greeney's rooms evoke something of a sense of the rooms as they might have been)
"Quite surprising, Philip has had great energy and taste, and devoted himself to making our little house perfect. His taste was so architectural and accurate, at first it was quite bewildering to me, who was not accustomed to so much care in details of furnishing and house decoration,
but I soon learn my lesson and was stimulated to many developments of my own, more romantic and wilder inventions , he curbing and pruning."
Those more romantic ,wilder inventions would return, time and time again at home and in my heart.
(in writing this story-I have used Quotation Marks to indicate OTTOLINE'S Words. All other text is my own-assuming Otts. Voice)
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