taste,' Herbert Le Breton used to say, blandly, 'and all of it of
the most atrocious description; she picked it up, I believe, when
my poor father was quartered at Lahore, a station absolutely fatal
to the aesthetic faculties; and she will never get rid of it again
as long as she lives.' Indeed, when once Lady Le Breton got anything
whatsoever into her head, it was not easy for anybody else to get
it out again; you might much more readily expect to draw one of her
double teeth than to eliminate one of her pet opinions. Not that
she was a stupid or a near-sighted woman--the mother of clever
sons never is--but she was a perfectly immovable rock of social
and political orthodoxy. The three Le Breton boys--for there was
a third at home--would gladly have reformed the terrors of that
awful drawing-room if they had dared; but they knew it was as much
as their places were worth, Herbert said, to attempt a remonstrance,
and they wisely left it alone, and said nothing.

Of course the house was not vulgarly furnished, at least in the
conventional sense of the word; Lady Le Breton was far too rigid
in her social orthodoxy to have admitted into her rooms anything
that savoured of what she considered bad form, according to her
lights. It was only vulgar with the underlying vulgarity of mere
tasteless fashionable uniformity. There was nothing in it that any
well-bred footman could object to; nothing that anybody with one
grain of genuine originality could possibly tolerate. The little
occasional chairs and tables set casually about the room were of
the strictest neglige Belgravian type, a sort of studied protest
against the formal stiffness of the ordinary unused middle-class
drawing-room. The portrait of the late Sir Owen in the wee library,
presented by his brother-officers, was painted by that distinguished
R. A., Sir Francis Thomson, a light of the middle of this century;