not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks. In
the middle of the room there is a big ottoman; and this, with the
carpet, the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window
curtains and brocade covers of the ottoman and its cushions,
supply all the ornament, and are much too handsome to be hidden
by odds and ends of useless things. A few good oil-paintings from
the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty years ago (the
Burne Jones, not the Whistler side of them) are on the walls. The
only landscape is a Cecil Lawson on the scale of a Rubens. There
is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion
in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which,
when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the
absurdities of popular estheticism in the eighteen-seventies.

In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs. Higgins, now over
sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the
fashion, sits writing at an elegantly simple writing-table with a
bell button within reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale
chair further back in the room between her and the window nearest
her side. At the other side of the room, further forward, is an
Elizabethan chair roughly carved in the taste of Inigo Jones. On
the same side a piano in a decorated case. The corner between the
fireplace and the window is occupied by a divan cushioned in
Morris chintz.

It is between four and five in the afternoon.

The door is opened violently; and Higgins enters with his hat on.

MRS. HIGGINS [dismayed] Henry [scolding him]! What are you doing