way, was the cottage."

"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste--it was Vee-Vee's. She did
everything."

"She told us _he_ did."

"Poor darling--she wanted us to think he did."

"He appreciated it, anyhow."

"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."

"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"

"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything
to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."

Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and
now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't
that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine
things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to
each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for
Jimmy to exploit his fury.

In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But
not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested
to him that you _could_ mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with
tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in
the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule
cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets
and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and
eighteenth-century gilded bergere chairs to old oak and Chippendale.
Cloisonne and Sevres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an
Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at
intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade
of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was
a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the
front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide
archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an
Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.

"And the awfullest thing of all is," Norah was saying, "that he's done it
to please her."

"Don't believe her. That's the beautiful part of it."

Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.

Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not
caring.

We couldn't say anything--we were too miserable. She looked round the
dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as
if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetra