om was now keeping himself and
repaying the weakened parent. The rest cost more and more every year as
their minds and bodies budded and flowered. It was endless, it was
staggering, it would not bear thinking about. The long and varied
chronicle of it was somehow written on the drawing-room as well as on
the faces of the father and mother--on the drawing-room which had the
same dignified, childlike, indefatigable, invincible, jolly expression
as its owners. Threadbare in places? And why not? The very identical
Turkey carpet at which Edwin gazed in his self-consciousness--on that
carpet Janet the queenly and mature had sprawled as an infant while her
mother, a fresh previous Janet of less than thirty, had cooed and said
incomprehensible foolishness to her. Tom was patriarchal because he had
vague memories of an earlier drawing-room, misted in far antiquity.
Threadbare? By heaven, its mere survival was magnificent! I say that
it was a miraculous drawing-room. Its chairs were humanised. Its
little cottage piano that nobody ever opened now unless Tom had gone mad
on something for two pianos, because it was so impossibly tinny--the
cottage piano could humanly recall the touch of a perfect baby when
Marian the wife sat down to it. Marian was one of your silly
sentimental nice things; on account of its associations, she really
preferred the cottage piano to the grand. The two carpets were both
resigned, grim old humanities, used to dirty heels, and not caring, or
pretending not to care. What did the curtains know of history? Naught.
They were always new; they could not last. But even the newest
curtains would at once submit to the influence of the room, and take on
something of its physiognomy, and help to express its comfortableness.
You could not hang a week in front of one of those windows without being
subtly informed by the tradition of adventurous happiness that presided
over the room. It was that: a drawing-room in which a man and a woman,
and boys and girls, had been on the whole happy, if often apprehensive.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

The music began to engage Edwin's attention. It was music of a kind
quite novel to him. Most of it had no meaning for him, but at intervals
some fragment detached itself from the mass, and stood out beautiful.
It was as if he were gazing at a stage in gloom, but lighted momentarily
by fleeting rays that revealed