lf
immediately in the dining-room. What, no hall? exclaims my luxurious
friend, accustomed to all the comfortable appurtenances of modern
life. Yes, kind sir, a noble hall, if you will but observe it;
a true old English hall of excellent dimensions for a country
gentleman's family; but, if you please, no dining-parlour.

Both Mr. and Miss Thorne were proud of this peculiarity of their
dwelling, though the brother was once all but tempted by his friends
to alter it. They delighted in the knowledge that they, like Cedric,
positively dined in their true hall, even though they so dined
_tete-a-tete_. But though they had never owned, they had felt and
endeavoured to remedy the discomfort of such an arrangement. A huge
screen partitioned off the front door and a portion of the hall, and
from the angle so screened off a second door led into a passage which
ran along the larger side of the house next to the courtyard. Either
my reader or I must be a bad hand at topography, if it be not clear
that the great hall forms the ground-floor of the smaller portion
of the mansion, that which was to your left as you entered the iron
gate, and that it occupies the whole of this wing of the building.
It must be equally clear that it looks out on a trim mown lawn,
through three quadrangular windows with stone mullions, each window
divided into a larger portion at the bottom, and a smaller portion at
the top, and each portion again divided into five by perpendicular
stone supporters. There may be windows which give a better light
than such as these, and it may be, as my utilitarian friend observes,
that the giving of light is the desired object of a window. I will
not argue the point with him. Indeed I cannot. But I shall not the
less die in the assured conviction that no sort or description of
window is capable of imparting half so much happiness to mankind as
that which had been adopted at Ullathorne Court. What, not an oriel?
says Miss Diana de Midellage. No, Miss Diana, not even an oriel,
beautiful as is an oriel window. It has not about it so perfect a
feeling of quiet English homely comfort. Let oriel windows grace a
college, or the half-public mansion of a potent peer, but for the
sitting room of quiet country ladies, of ordinary homely folk,
nothing can equal the square, mullioned windows of the Tudor
architects.

The hall was hung round with family female insipidities by Lely and
unprepossessing male Thornes in red coats by Knell