could really kindle a fire. A davenport was a compromise, but what
was all life but a compromise? He could beat down the dealer, and at
Mrs. Bundy's he had to write on an insincere card-table. After he
had sat for a minute with his nose in the friendly desk he had a
queer impression that it might tell him a secret or two--one of the
secrets of form, one of the sacrificial mysteries--though no doubt
its career had been literary only in the sense of its helping some
old lady to write invitations to dull dinners. There was a strange,
faint odour in the receptacle, as if fragrant, hallowed things had
once been put away there. When he took his head out of it he said to
the shopman: "I don't mind meeting you halfway." He had been told
by knowing people that that was the right thing. He felt rather
vulgar, but the davenport arrived that evening at Jersey Villas.



CHAPTER II.



"I daresay it will be all right; he seems quiet now," said the poor
lady of the "parlours" a few days later, in reference to their
litigious neighbour and the precarious piano. The two lodgers had
grown regularly acquainted, and the piano had had much to do with it.
Just as this instrument served, with the gentleman at No. 4, as a
theme for discussion, so between Peter Baron and the lady of the
parlours it had become a basis of peculiar agreement, a topic, at any
rate, of conversation frequently renewed. Mrs. Ryves was so
prepossessing that Peter was sure that even if they had not had the
piano he would have found something else to thresh out with her.