slate-coloured walls scarred and patched with new plaster, and relieved
only by a gigantic painting of the Royal Arms on panel in a blackened
frame; its ceiling garnished with four pendants in plaster, like bride-
cake ornaments inverted.

To-day, as she stepped across the threshold, Dorothea hesitated between
stopping her ears and rubbing her eyes. The place was a Babel.
Frenchmen in white paper caps and stained linen blouses were laughing,
plying their brushes, mixing paints, shifting ladders, and jabbering
all the while at the pitch of their voices. For a moment the din
bewildered her; the ferment had no more meaning, no more method, than
a schoolboy's game. But her eyes, passing over the chaos of paint-pots,
brushes, and step-ladders, told her the place had been transformed.
The ceiling between the four pendants had become a blue heaven with
filmy clouds, and Cupids scattering roses before a train of doves and
a recumbent goddess, whom a little Italian, perched on a scaffolding
and whistling shrilly, was varnishing for dear life. Around the walls--
sky-blue also--trellises of vines and pink roses clambered around the
old panels. The energy of the workmen had passed into their paintings,
or perhaps Dorothea's head swam; at any rate, the cupids and doves
seemed to be whirling across the ceiling, the vines, and roses mounting
towards it, and pushing out shoots and tendrils while they climbed.

But the panels themselves! They were nine in all: three down the long
black wall, two narrower ones at the far end, four between the orange-
curtained windows looking on the street. (The fourth wall had no panel,
being covered, by the musicians' gallery and the pillars supporting
it.) In each, framed by the vines and roses, glowed a scene of
classical or pseudo-classical splendour; golden sunsets, pale yellow
skies, landscapes cleverly imitated from recollections of Claude