There was no possible mistake about it. "Billiard room" those were the words; and as a billiard-room was a sine qua non, and the rest of the description of the house seemed satisfactory and its situation was agreeable, I chartered a car at enormous expense—no one can call tenpence a mile anything but enormous expense—and hurried away with an "order to view."
It was not a bad house. The agent's printed words and the edifice cannot be said exactly to have run in double harness; but it was not a bad house. I don't say I should myself have called it precisely "old world," but then I am rather fastidious about epithets; and it was obvious that if one of the alleged seven bedrooms was used as a dressing room the number of the bedrooms would be reduced to six; that is to say. the house possessed either seven bedrooms and no dressing-room, or a dressing-room and six bedrooms, but under no conditions seven bedrooms as well as a dressing- room, as the specification would have you think. Still, it was not a bad house.
Having seen all over it I asked the "caretaker on premises" if I might now look at the billiard-room.
"Billiard-room?" she said vaguely.
I showed her the agent's list, with the smiling announcement in black-and-white.
She read it, but was still nonplussed. At last a light broke in. "Oh, yes," she said, "I suppose they mean the attic"; and she again led the way upstairs to a point on the top landing beneath a trap-door in the ceiling.
"They mean that," she said. "Would you like to go up? There's a ladder close by."
I declined. A half-size bagatelle-board might conceivably be insinuated through this trap and erected on the unstable floor; but nothing bigger or heavier; and as for light.....