m, which last was inevitably shaped in
the resemblance of an L. The small back portion of it over George's den
was never utilized save by the grand piano and rare pianists. Still, the
code demanded that the drawing-room should have this strange appendage,
and that a grand piano should reside in it modestly, apologetically,
like a shame that cannot be entirely concealed. Nearly every house in
Elm Park Road, and every house in scores of miles of other correct
streets in the West End, had a drawing-room shaped in the semblance of
an L, and a grand piano in the hinterland thereof. The drawing-room,
like the dining-room, was occupied during about four hours of the
twenty-four, and wasted during the remaining twenty.

The two main floors of the house being in such manner accounted for, the
family and its dependents principally lived aloft on the second and
third floors. Eight souls slept up there nightly. A miracle of
compression!

George had had the house for ten years; he entered it as a bridegroom.
He had stayed in it for seven years because the landlord would only
confide it to him on lease, and at the end of the seven years he lacked
the initiative to leave it. An ugly house, utterly without architectural
merit! A strange house for an architect to inhabit! George, however, had
never liked it. Before his marriage he had discovered a magnificent
house in Fitzroy Square, a domestic masterpiece of the Adams period,
exquisitely designed without and within, huge rooms and many rooms,
lovely ceilings, a forged-iron stair-rail out of Paradise; a house
appreciably nearer to the centre than the one in Elm Park Road, and with
a lower rental. George would have taken the house, had not Lois pointed
out to him its fatal disadvantage, which had escaped him, namely, that
people simply did not live in Fitzroy Square. Instantly Lois entered
Fitzroy Square, George knew himself for a blind fool. Of course the
house was impossible. He was positively ashamed to show her the house.
She admitted that it was beautiful. So Elm Park Road was finally
selected, Elm Park Road being a street where people could, and in fact
did, live. It was astounding how Lois, with her small and fragmentary
knowledge of London, yet knew, precisely and infallibly, by instinct, by
the sound of the names of the thoroughfares, by magic diabolical or
celestial, what streets were inhabitable and what were not. And
something in George agreed with her.

He now rummaged am