A long, low, rectangular and rather narrow room, supported across the
centre--where passage walls had been cut away--by an avenue of dumpy
wooden pillars, four on either side, leading to a glass door opening on
to the garden. A man's room rather than a woman's, and, judging by
appearances, a bachelor's at that.--Eighteenth-century furniture, not
ignoble in line, but heavy, wide-seated, designed for the comfort of
bulky paunched figures arrayed in long napped waistcoats and full-skirted
coats. Tabaret curtains and upholsterings, originally maroon, now dulled
by sea damp and bleached by sun-glare to a uniform tone in which colour
and pattern were alike obliterated. Handsome copperplate engravings of
Pisa and of Rome, and pastel portraits in oval frames; the rest of the
whity brown panelled wall space hidden by book-cases. These surmounted by
softly shining, pearl-grey Chinese godlings, monsters, philosophers and
saints, the shelves below packed with neatly ranged books.

A dusky room, in spite of its rounded, outstanding sash-windows, two on
either side the glass door; the air of it holding, in permanent solution,
an odour of leather-bound volumes. A place, in short, which, though not
inhospitable, imposed itself, its qualities and traditions, to an extent
impossible for any save the most thick-skinned and thick-witted wholly to
ignore or resist.

Young Tom Verity, having no convenient armour-plating of stupidity,
suffered its influence intimately as--looking about him with quick
enquiring glances--he followed the man-servant across it between the
dumpy pillars. He felt self-conscious and disquieted, as by a smile of
silent amusement upon some watchful elderly face. So impressed, indeed,
was he that, on reaching the door, he paused, letting the man pass on
alone to announce him. He wanted time in which to get over this queer
sensation of shyness, before presenting himself to the company assembled,