The rooms were opened in the seventh week. Hannah did it properly and slowly, and made Mrs. Trant the mistress of the whole business—which she did deliberately, and which she said afterward was the single most useful thing she did in her first year.
And Nicholas Ware came into the west corridor on about the fourth day on his way somewhere else, and stopped. There were four doors standing open, and a smell of soap and wet plaster, and two housemaids on their knees, and a man on a ladder in the far room doing something to a ceiling. He stood there for about half a minute.
Then he went and found his wife, who was in the small drawing room with the household books, and said in a voice she had not heard from him before, and did not hear again for about a year, "What are you doing?"
Hannah put down her pen. "I am opening the west rooms."
"Why?"
"Because they have been shut six years, and the chimneys are perished. And if they are left another two winters, the plaster will go, and it will cost about four times as much then as it will now." She kept her voice entirely level. "And because there are nine dead trees in the lower orchard, and a sash cord in this room that has been broken since the spring. Sit down, Nicholas. I am going to say something, and I have been three days arranging it, and you are not going to like any of it."
Nicholas Ware did not sit down.
"Say it standing, then," said Hannah Sedge, "and I shall say it anyway. This house has stopped. Not because anybody decided it, but because you told Mrs. Trant not to replant the orchard in the second year, and every single person under this roof took the sense of that, and has been quietly applying it to everything since. Nobody here begins anything that takes longer than a year. Nobody mends anything that will still be wanted in five. And nobody has said one word about it in eight years, because the only way to say it is to ask you how long you have got. And there is not a person in this building who could do that."
"And you can?"