m; for, with it all, above
it all, how and why he could not say, the room was delightful. It seemed
to set one free from some burden of appreciation that all unconsciously
one had been carrying and had been finding heavy. One could live in it,
laughing at and with it. For it all laughed--surely yes; and the elfish
chorus was led by the white pagoda, standing like a Chinese Pierrot, at
the centre of the revels.

Old Mrs. Waterlow at last came sailing in, and her black lace shawl and
lace-draped head looked as appropriate in the room as everything else
seemed to do. Her eyes dwelt on him with a certain fixity, and in them
he seemed to read further significances. They held an intention, gay,
precise, such as he had felt in the room; and they held, too, it might
be, a touch of light-hearted cruelty.

"Yes, isn't it changed?" she said, and he knew that his state of
astonishment had spoken from his face.

He stared round him again, smiling.

"It makes me feel," he said, "like the old woman in the nursery rhyme
whose skirts were cut up to her knees while she was asleep. One says,
'If I be I.'"

"And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Waterlow; "but one who doesn't bark
at you, so that you can be assured of your identity. I am really more
aware of my own in this room than in any I've lived in for years. It is
like one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms weren't so important then as
they are now, and the people who lived in them, I sometimes think, were
more so. It amuses me nowadays," said the old lady moving to her
tea-table and seating herself, "to observe the way in which people are
assessed by their tastes and their belongings. You say of some one that
she is a dull or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and rebuke you
receive is, 'Oh, but she has such wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down
here, Mr. Stacpole. It is very nice to see you again."

"But tell me, where is the other room?" Owen asked, drawing his chair to
the table, "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone for ever?"

Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of half-malicious mystery.

"That is a secret, my own little secret, just as this room is, in a way,
a little joke which, for my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was
finished last week, by the way, and you are the first person to see it.
Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow,
with bland inconsequence.

"Yes; I'm only passing through. Gwendolen's been gone for nearly a
month."