th serried lines of bound
magazines, and an excellent Brussels carpet of quiet pattern, were
mainly responsible for a general effect of middle-class comfort, in
which, indeed, if beauty had not been included, it had not been wilfully
violated, but merely unthought of. The young people for whom these
familiar objects meant a symbolism deep-rooted in their earliest
memories could hardly in fairness have declared anything positively
painful in that room--except perhaps those Atlantic liners; their
charges against furniture, which was unconsciously to them accumulating
memories that would some day bring tears of tenderness to their eyes,
could only have been negative. Beauty had been left out, but at least
ugliness had not been ostentatiously called in. There was no bad taste.

In fact, whatever the individual character of each component object,
there was included in the general effect a certain indefinable dignity,
which had doubtless nothing to do with the mahogany, but was probably
one of those subtle atmospheric impressions which a room takes from the
people who habitually live in it. Had you entered that room when it was
empty, you would instinctively have felt that it was accustomed to the
occupancy of calm and refined people. There was something almost
religious in its quiet. Some one often sat there who, whatever his
commonplace disguises as a provincial man of business, however
inadequate to his powers the work life had given him to do, provincial
and humiliating as were the formulae with which narrowing conditions had
supplied him for expression of himself, was in his central being an
aristocrat,--though that was the very last word James Mesurier would
have thought of applying to himself. He was a man of business, serving
God and his employers with stern uprightness, and bringing up a large
family with something of the Puritan severity which had marked his own
early training; and, as in his own case no such allowance had been made,
making no allowance in his rigid abstract code for the diverse
temperaments of his children,--children in whom certain qualities and
needs of his own nature, dormant from his birth, were awakening,
supplemented by the fuller-fed intelligence and richer nature of the
mother, into expansive and rebellious individualities.

It was now about eleven o'clock, and the house was thus lit and alive
half-an-hour beyond the rigorously enforced bed-time. An hour before,
James Mesurier had been pea