a year ago."

"You silly old thing."

"I am. I am. But isn't it splendid to be able to be silly?"

He opened the door of the studio and Jenny walked into what seemed an
astonishingly large room. There were windows at either end and a long
skylight overhead. The ceiling was raftered and on the transverse beams
were heaped all sorts of things that young men bring to London but never
use, such as cricket-bats and tennis-racquets and skates.

The windows on one side looked out over the river, over barges going up
on the full flood, and chimneys flying streamers of pearl-gray smoke.
The windows on the other side opened on to a sea of roofs that rolled
away down to a low line of purple cloud above whose bronzed and jagged
edge the Byzantine tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in silhouette
against a sky of primrose very lucent and serene.

There was a wide fireplace with a scarred rug before it and on either
side a deal seat with high straight back. There were divans by the same
craftsman along the whitewashed walls, and shelves of tumbled books.
Here and there were broken statues and isolated lead-bound panes of
colored glass, with an easel and a model's throne and the trunk of a lay
figure. There was a large table littered with papers and tins of
pineapple and a broken bag of oranges very richly hued in the sunset.
The floor was covered with matting, over which were scattered Persian
rugs whose arabesques of mauve and puce were merged in a depth of warm
color by the fleeting daylight. On the walls were autotypes of Mona Lisa
and Botticelli's Venus, of the Prince of Orange and little Philip the
Fourth, on his great horse. There was also an alleged Rubens, the
purchase of Maurice's first year at Oxford, from the responsibility of
whose possession he had never recovered. There were drawings on the
wall itself of arms and legs and breasts and necks, and a row of casts
in plaster of Paris. Here and there on shelves were blue ginger-jars,
Burmese masks and rolls of Florentine end-papers. There was a
grandfather-clock, lacquered and silent, which leaned slightly forward
to ponder its appearance in a Venetian mirror whose frame was blown in a
design of pink and blue roses and shepherds. The window-curtains were
chintz in a pattern of faded crimson birds and brown vine-leaves stained
with mildew. In one corner was a pile of brocaded green satin that was
intended to cover the undulating horsehair sofa before the fire.

Maurice'