as
already engaged to be married.

CHAPTER II

Lady Macleod

I cannot say that the house in Queen Anne Street was a pleasant
house. I am now speaking of the material house, made up of the walls
and furniture, and not of any pleasantness or unpleasantness supplied
by the inmates. It was a small house on the south side of the street,
squeezed in between two large mansions which seemed to crush it,
and by which its fair proportion of doorstep and area was in truth
curtailed. The stairs were narrow; the dining-room was dark, and
possessed none of those appearances of plenteous hospitality which a
dining-room should have. But all this would have been as nothing if
the drawing-room had been pretty as it is the bounden duty of all
drawing-rooms to be. But Alice Vavasor's drawing-room was not pretty.
Her father had had the care of furnishing the house, and he had
intrusted the duty to a tradesman who had chosen green paper, a green
carpet, green curtains, and green damask chairs. There was a green
damask sofa, and two green arm-chairs opposite to each other at the
two sides of the fireplace. The room was altogether green, and was
not enticing. In shape it was nearly square, the very small back room
on the same floor not having been, as is usual, added to it. This had
been fitted up as a "study" for Mr Vavasor, and was very rarely used
for any purpose.

Most of us know when we enter a drawing-room whether it is a pretty
room or no; but how few of us know how to make a drawing-room pretty!
There has come up in London in these latter days a form of room so
monstrously ugly that I will venture to say that no other people on
earth but Londoners would put up with it. Londoners, as a rule, take
their houses as they can get them, looking only to situation, size,
and price. What Grecian, what Roman, what Turk, what Italian would
endure, or would ever have endured, to use a room with a monstrous
cantle in the form of a parallelogram cut sheerly out of one corner
of it? This is the shape of room we have now adopted,--or rather
which the builders have adopted for us,--in order to throw the whole
first floor into one apartment which may be presumed to have noble
dimensions,--with such drawback from it as the necessities of the
staircase may require. A sharp unadorned corner projects itself into
these would-be noble dimensions, and as ugly a form of chamber is
produced as any upon which the eye can look. I would say more on
th