ease. The
pictures are mostly of the culture of yesterday--Watts, Rossetti, a
Whistler or so; perhaps, courageously, a Monet reproduction. The
occasional tables bear slim volumes of slim verse, and a novel from
Mudie's. There is one of those ubiquitous fumed-oak bookcases. They go
in a little for statuettes, of a kind. There is no attempt at heavy
lavishness, nor is there any attempt at breaking away from tradition.
The piano is open. The music on the stand is "Little Grey Home in the
West"; it is smothering Tchaikowsky's "Chant sans Paroles." There are
several volumes of music--suspiciously new--Chopin's Nocturnes, Mozart's
Sonaten, Schubert's Songs.

After dinner, the children climb all over you, and upset your coffee,
and burn themselves on your cigarette. Then Mother asks the
rumple-haired baby, eight years old, to recite to the guest, and she
declines. So Mother goes to the piano, and insists that she shall sing.
To this she consents, so long as she may turn her back on her audience.
So she stands, her little legs looking so pathetic in socks, by her
mother, and sings, very prettily, "Sweet and Low" and that delicate
thing of Thomas Dekker's--"Golden Slumbers"--with its lovely
seventeenth-century melody, full of the graceful sad-gaiety of past
things, and of a pathos the more piercing because at first unsuspected;
beauty and sorrow crystallized in a few simple chords.

Then baby goes in care of the maid to bed, and Mother and Father and
Helen, who is twelve years old, go to the pictures at the Palladium near
Balham Station. There, for sixpence, they have an entertainment which is
quite satisfying to their modest temperaments and one, withal, which is
quite suitable to Miss Twelve Years Old; for Father and Mother are
Proper People, and would not like to take their treasure to the sullying
atmosphere of even a suburban music-hall.

So they spend a couple of hours with the pictures, listening to an
orchestra of a piano, a violin, and a 'cello, which plays even
indifferent music really well. And they roar over the facial
extravagances of Ford Sterling and his friends Fatty and Mabel; they
applaud, and Miss Twelve Years Old secretly admires the airy adventures
of the debonair Max Linder--she thinks he is a dear, only she daren't
tell Mother and Father so, or they would be startled. And then there is
Mr. C. Chaplin--always there is Mr. C. Chaplin. Personally, I loathe the
cinematograph. It is, I think, the most tedio