ireplaces surmounted by
coats-of-arms in carved oak that enhanced this five-windowed room with a
dignity which no other undergraduate lodging could claim. The house at
this period was kept by a retired college cook, who produced for dinner
parties wonderful old silver which all his tenants believed to have been
stolen from the kitchen of his college. The large room of 202 High gave
the house its character, but there were many other rooms besides.
Wedderburn, for instance had on the third story a sitting-room whose
white paneling and Georgian grace had been occupied by generations of
the transitory exquisites of art and fashion. Downstairs in the aqueous
twilight created by a back garden was the dining-room which the four of
them possessed in common. As for the other lodgers, none were St. Mary's
men, and their existence was only alluded to by Michael and his friends
when the ex-cook charged them for these strangers' entertainments.

Michael was the first to arrive at Two Hundred and Two, and he
immediately set to work to arrange in the way that pleased him best the
decorative and personal adjuncts contributed by Grainger, Lonsdale, and
himself. For his own library he found a fine set of cupboards which he
completely filled. The books of Grainger and Lonsdale he banished to the
dining-room, where their scant numbers competed for space on the shelves
with jars of marmalade, egg-cups, and toast-racks. The inconvenience of
the confusion was helpfully obviated first by the fact that their
collection, or rather their accumulation, was nearly throughout in
duplicate owing to the similar literary tastes and intellectual travaux
forces of Grainger and Lonsdale, and secondly by the fact that for a
year to neither taste nor intellect was there frequent resort. With
their pictures Michael found the same difficulty of duplication, but as
there were two fireplaces he took an ingenious delight in supporting
each fireplace with similar pictures, so that Thorburn's grouse, Cecil
Aldin's brilliant billiard-rooms, Sir Galahad and Eton Society were to
be found at either end. Elsewhere on the spacious walls he hung his own
Blakes and Frederick Walkers, and the engraving of the morning stars
singing together he feathered with the photographic souvenirs of
Lonsdale's fagdom. As for the pictures that belonged to the ex-cook,
mostly very large photogravures of Marcus Stone such as one sees in the
corridors of theaters, these he took upstairs and