Colonel Crofts said that Bateman had cut a piece of it away and turned the pantry into a kind of gun-room, where fishing-tackle, waders, skis, ski-boots, cricket things and odds and ends could be kept.
“I always told you, Dunstan,” said the ex-Vicar’s aunt, “that the shelf was a stumbling-block.”
“Hardly that, Aunt Monica,” said the ex-Vicar. “Only a fool could stumble over a shelf three feet from the ground.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot said sotto voce that she didn’t think even a fool could do it, but luckily her sister-in-law was the only person to hear her. The ex-Vicar’s aunt then began a kind of inquisition into various other fixtures, not in any spirit of criticism of their new owner so much as to put her nephew in the wrong as much as possible, so that the conversation became a kind of indir
