kept and perfectly administered. Four living rooms, apart from the
domestic offices, were on the ground floor. One was the morning room, in
which they principally lived; one the dining room and one the
drawing-room. They were entered by enormously heavy doors of oak, fitted
with latches, the drawing-room up two steps, the dining room down one
step and the morning room and the fourth room on the level. All were
low-beamed and many-windowed with lattice windows; all were stepped into
as stepping into a very quiet place, and somehow into a room which one
had not expected to be there, or not quite that shape if a room were
there. Sabre never quite lost that feeling of pleasant surprise on
entering them. They had moreover, whether due to the skill of the
architect or the sagacity of Mabel, the admirable, but rare attribute of
being cool in summer and warm in winter.

The only room in the house which Sabre did not like was the fourth
sitting room on the ground floor; and it was his own room, furnished and
decorated by Mabel for his own particular use and comfort. But she
called it his "den", and Sabre loathed and detested the word den as
applied to a room a man specially inhabits. It implied to him a
masculine untidiness, and he was intensely orderly and hated untidiness.
It implied customs and manners of what he called "boarding-house
ideas",--the idea that a man must have an untidily comfortable apartment
into which he can retire and envelop himself in tobacco smoke, and where
he "can have his own things around him", and "have his pipes and his
pictures about him", and where he can wear "an old shooting jacket and
slippers",--and he loathed and detested all these phrases and the ideas
they connoted. He had no "old shooting jacket" and he would have given
it to the gardener if he had; and he detested wearing slippers and never
did wear slippers; it was his habit to put on his boots after his bath
and to keep them on till he put on shoes when changing for dinner. Above