ed
modernity.

Brodrick's garden was kept very smooth and very straight, no impudent
little flowers hanging out of their beds, no dissolute straggling of
creepers upon walls. Even the sweet-peas at the back were trained to a
perfect order and propriety.

And in Brodrick's house propriety and order were carried to the point of
superstition. Nothing in that queer-cornered, modern exterior was ever
out of place. No dust ever lay on floor or furniture. All the
white-painted woodwork was exquisitely white. Time there was measured by
a silver-chiming clock that struck the quiet hours with an infallible
regularity.

And yet Brodrick was not a tidy nor a punctual man. In his library the
spirit of order contended against fearful odds. For Brodrick lived in
his library, the long, book-lined, up-stairs room that ran half the
length of the house on the north side. But even there, violate as he
would his own sanctuary, the indestructible propriety renewed itself by
a diurnal miracle. He found books restored to their place, papers
sorted, everything an editor could want lying ready to his hand. For the
spirit of order rose punctually to perform its task.

But in the drawing-room its struggles and its triumph were complete.

It had been, so Brodrick's sisters told him, a man's idea of a
drawing-room. And now there were feminine touches, so incongruous and
scattered that they seemed the work of a person establishing herself
tentatively, almost furtively, by small inconspicuous advances and
instalments. A little work-table stood beside the low settle in the
corner by the fireplace. Gay, shining chintz covered the ugly chairs.
There were cushions here and there where a woman's back most needed
them. Books, too, classics in slender duo-decimo, bought for their
cheapness, novels (from the circulating library), of the kind that
Brodrick never read. On the top of a writing-table, flagrantly feminine
in its appointments, there stood, well in sight of the low chair, a
photograph of Brodrick which Brodrick could not possibly have framed and
put there.

The woman who entered this room now had all the air of being its
mistress; she moved in it so naturally and with such assurance, as in
her sphere. You would have judged her occupied with some mysterious
personal predilections with regard to drawing-rooms. She paused in her
passage to reinstate some article dishonoured by the parlour-maid, to
pat a cushion into shape and place a chair bett