Feeling right at home in the Vermont countryside

Your first impression is of rustic intimacy. The operative word in Pond House is ''house," and this one is not huge. When we arrive, innkeeper Gretel Schuck suggests we keep our voices down so as not to disturb a napping guest upstairs.

There are just three guest rooms; 10 acres of field, stone walls, and a flyspeck of a pond; a chicken coop, and a barn with five goats; and a commendable willingness to accept guests with ''polite" dogs. (Walking ours, we stumbled across a wonderful rural scene of a fawn frolicking in a field under the eye of its mother.) The house and barn sit in a web of country roads along which bikers swarm like just-hatched spiders. The owner, an elfin blonde of 58, greets us in denim overalls that will be her uniform for most of the weekend.

''The goats don't care if I wear Armani," Schuck says.

Still, she's no Daisy Mae. She may be an avid cyclist who takes her dog Jackson along when she competes in triathlons (''It's hard getting him on the bike," she says.), but Schuck is also well traveled by air. We spent part of our Italian honeymoon in Cinque Terra, so Kathy immediately notices the photos of that seaside resort hanging in the living room. Schuck visits Italy as often as possible, and she drizzles her house with European frills. Our bathroom soap dish says ''Hotel Metropole/Monte Carlo"; a copy of Renoir's ''Sur la Terrasse" is on our wall.

If staying here is like being invited into someone's home, few hosts lay out such a cosmopolitan spread for dinner. When we called to book the room, Schuck seemed mildly distressed to hear one of us is a vegetarian, since she cooks one meal for all guests. Fortunately, our dinner-mates, a congenial California couple cruising cross-continent, were game for a meatless menu, and we dined on polenta with sauted mushrooms.