drawing-room.

Everything was oppressively new. The brilliantly-varnished door
cracked with a report like a pistol when it was opened; the paper on
the walls, with its gaudy pattern of birds, trellis-work, and flowers,
in gold, red, and green on a white ground, looked hardly dry yet; the
showy window-curtains of white and sky-blue, and the still showier
carpet of red and yellow, seemed as if they had come out of the shop
yesterday; the round rosewood table was in a painfully high state of
polish; the morocco-bound picture books that lay on it, looked as if
they had never been moved or opened since they had been bought; not
one leaf even of the music on the piano was dogs-eared or worn. Never
was a richly furnished room more thoroughly comfortless than this--the
eye ached at looking round it. There was no repose anywhere. The print
of the Queen, hanging lonely on the wall, in its heavy gilt frame,
with a large crown at the top, glared on you: the paper, the curtains,
the carpet glared on you: the books, the wax-flowers in glass-cases,
the chairs in flaring chintz-covers, the china plates on the door, the
blue and pink glass vases and cups ranged on the chimney-piece, the
over-ornamented chiffoniers with Tonbridge toys and long-necked
smelling bottles on their upper shelves--all glared on you. There was
no look of shadow, shelter, secrecy, or retirement in any one nook or
corner of those four gaudy walls. All surrounding objects seemed
startlingly near to the eye; much nearer than they really were. The
room would have given a nervous man the headache, before he had been
in it a quarter of an hour.

I was not kept waiting long. Another violent crack from the new door,
announced the entrance of Mr. Sherwin himself.