sitting-room that can be spared from the children and the family
meals, the parson, the Reverend James Mavor Morell does his work.
He is sitting in a strong round backed revolving chair at the
right hand end of a long table, which stands across the window,
so that he can cheer himself with the view of the park at his
elbow. At the opposite end of the table, adjoining it, is a
little table; only half the width of the other, with a typewriter
on it. His typist is sitting at this machine, with her back to
the window. The large table is littered with pamphlets, journals,
letters, nests of drawers, an office diary, postage scales and
the like. A spare chair for visitors having business with the
parson is in the middle, turned to his end. Within reach of his
hand is a stationery case, and a cabinet photograph in a frame.
Behind him the right hand wall, recessed above the fireplace, is
fitted with bookshelves, on which an adept eye can measure the
parson's divinity and casuistry by a complete set of Browning's
poems and Maurice's Theological Essays, and guess at his politics
from a yellow backed Progress and Poverty, Fabian Essays, a Dream
of John Ball, Marx's Capital, and half a dozen other literary
landmarks in Socialism. Opposite him on the left, near the
typewriter, is the door. Further down the room, opposite the
fireplace, a bookcase stands on a cellaret, with a sofa near it.
There is a generous fire burning; and the hearth, with a
comfortable armchair and a japanned flower painted coal scuttle
at one side, a miniature chair for a boy or girl on the other, a
nicely varnished wooden mantelpiece, with neatly moulded shelves,
tiny bits of mirror let into the panels, and a travelling clock
in a leather case (the inevitable wedding present), and on the
wall above a large autotype of the chief figure in Titian's
Virgin of the Assumption, is very inviting. Altogether the room