impeccable servants, receiving friends with beauty
and unsurpassable sweet dignity, wearing costly frocks and jewels as
though she had never worn anything else. She had the calm power, she had
the individuality, to fulfil all his desires for her. She would be the
authentic queen of which Mrs. John was merely the imitation. He wanted
intensely to talk to her about the future.... And then he had the
seductive idea of making presentable his bed-sitting-room at Mr. Haim's.
He saw the room instantaneously transformed; he at once invented each
necessary dodge for absolutely hiding during the day the inconvenient
fact that it had to serve as a bedroom at night; he refurnished it; he
found the money to refurnish it. And just as he was impatient to get
back home in order to work, so he was impatient to get back home in
order to transform his chamber into the ideal. Delay irked him
painfully. And yet he was extremely happy in the excitement of the
dreams that ached to be fulfilled.

"Now, Mr. Enwright," said Mrs. John in an accent to draw honey out of a
boulder. "You haven't told me what you think of it."

Enwright was wandering about by himself.

"He's coming on with his lithographs," he replied, as if after a
decision. "One or two of these are rather interesting."

"Oh! I don't mean the lithographs. You know those are all Jack's
affairs. I mean--well, the room. Now do pay me a compliment."

The other guests listened.

Enwright gave a little self-conscious smile, characteristic of him in
these dilemmas, half kind and half malicious.

"You must have taken a great deal of trouble over it," he said, with
bright amiability; and then relapsing from the effort: "it's all very
nice and harmless."

"Oh! Mr. Enwright! Is that all?" She pouted, though still waving the
palm. "And you so fond of the eighteenth century, too!"

"But I heard a rumour at the beginning of this year that we're living in
the twentieth," said Enwright.

"And I thought I should please you!" sighed Adela. "What _ought_ I to
have done?"

"Well, you might have asked me to design you some furniture. Nobody ever
has asked me yet." He rubbed his eyeglasses and blinked.

"Oh! You geniuses.... Janet darling!"

Mrs. John moved forward to meet Miss Orgreave, John's appreciably elder
sister, spinster, who lived with another brother, Charles, a doctor at
Ealing. Janet was a prim emaciated creature, very straight and
dignified, whose glance always seemed to hesi