breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this
immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of
their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified
attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a
religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the
Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They
utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation,
punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is
Mrs. Eliott's day.

The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of
trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries
met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the
place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled
by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian
furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were
great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and
cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid
profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years
of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent
culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few
diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome
and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych
with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met,