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down the room, opposite the fireplace, a bookcase stands on a cellaret,
with a sofa near it. There is a generous fire burning; and the hearth,
with a comfortable armchair and a japanned flower painted coal scuttle
at one side, a miniature chair for a boy or girl on the other, a nicely
varnished wooden mantelpiece, with neatly moulded shelves, tiny bits of
mirror let into the panels, and a travelling clock in a leather case
(the inevitable wedding present), and on the wall above a large
autotype of the chief figure in Titian's Virgin of the Assumption, is
very inviting. Altogether the room is the room of a good housekeeper,
vanquished, as far as the table is concerned, by an untidy man, but
elsewhere mistress of the situation. The furniture, in its ornamental
aspect, betrays the style of the advertised "drawing-room suite" of the
pushing suburban furniture dealer; but there is nothing useless or
pretentious in the room. The paper and panelling are dark, throwing the
big cheery window and the park outside into strong relief.
The Reverend James Mavor Morell is a Christian Socialist clergyman of
the Church of England, and an active member of the Guild of St. Matthew
and the Christian Social Union. A vigorous, genial, popular man of
forty, robust and goodlooking, full of energy, with pleasant, hearty,
considerate manners, and a sound, unaffected voice, which he uses with
the clean, athletic articulation of a practised orator, and with a wide
range and perfect command of expression. He is a first rate clergyman,
able to say what he likes to whom he likes, to lecture people without
setting himself up against them, to impose his authority on them
without humiliating them, and to interfere in their business without
impertinence. His well-spring of spiritual enthusiasm and sympathetic
emotion has never run dry for a moment: he still eats and sleeps
heartily enough to win the daily battle between exhaustion and
recuperation triumphantly. Withal, a great baby, pardonably vain of his
powers and unconsciously pleased with himself. He has a healthy
complexion, a good forehead, with the brows somewhat blunt, and the
eyes bright and eager, a mouth resolute, but not particularly well cut,
and a substantial nose, with the mobile, spreading nostrils of the
dramatic orator, but, like all his features, void of subtlety.
The typist, Miss Proserpine Garnett, is a brisk little woman of about
30, of the lower middle class, neatly but cheapl
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