uncompromising reconstitution of a period which he had everywhere
carried out in his abode.

The drawing-room, with its moulded ceiling and huge recessed window,
had presented an admirable field for connoisseurship. Here the clash
of rich primary colours, the perpendiculars which began with bronze
girls' heads and ended with bronze girls' feet or animals' claws,
the vast flat surfaces of furniture, the stiff curves of wood and a
drapery, the morbid rage for solidity which would employ a candelabrum
weighing five hundredweight to hold a single wax candle, produced a
real and imposing effect of style; it was a style debased, a style
which was shedding the last graces of French Empire in order soon to
appeal to a Victoria determined to be utterly English and good; but
it was a style. And G.J. had scamped no detail. Even the pictures were
hung with thick tasselled cords of the Regency. The drawing-room was a
triumph.

Do not conceive that G.J. had lost his head about furniture and that
his notion of paradise was an endless series of second-hand shops.
He had an admirable balance; and he held that a man might make a
faultless interior for himself and yet not necessarily lose his
balance. He resented being called a specialist in furniture. He
regarded himself as an amateur of life, and, if a specialist in
anything, as a specialist in friendships. Yet he was a solitary man
(liking solitude without knowing that he liked it), and in the midst
of the perfections which he had created he sometimes gloomily thought:
"What in the name of God am I doing on this earth?"

He went into the drawing-room, and there, by the fire and in front of
a formidable blue chair whose arms developed into the grinning