The brochure promised serenity amid bucolic scenery. (serenity: tranquility, calmness, peacefulness; bucolic: pastoral, rustic, rural) Visitors did find the stream pastoral. (pastoral: bucolic, rustic, rural) They also found the inn's rules inflexible, the hostess imperious and the posted schedule of compulsory leisure incomprehensible. (inflexible: rigid, unyielding, unbending; imperious: domineering, overbearing, dictatorial; compulsory: mandatory, obligatory, required; incomprehensible: unintelligible, inscrutable, unfathomable) By Thursday the veranda was deserted.
One outspoken guest tried to explain the paradox. (outspoken: frank, forthright, candid; paradox: apparent contradiction, seeming contradiction, inconsistency) Guests who came to read needed a place to converse. (converse: talk, chat, speak) Guests who came for company wanted an occasional hour of solitude. The hostess saw them as incompatible groups and had assigned opposite hours. (incompatible: conflicting, inconsistent, contradictory) Now nobody could choose where to sit.
She moved one chair to the willow and set a little table between two others. By sunset the porch was lively and the willow occupied. The paradoxical improvement cost one chair's worth of chipped paint. (paradoxical: self-contradictory, apparently contradictory, counterintuitive) The next brochure showed it exactly as it was.