itty had had her impetuous and decided way with the furnishing of it;
and, though Lady Tranmore professed to admire it, the result was, in
truth, too French and too pagan for her taste. Her own room reflected
the rising worship of Morris and Burse-Jones, of which, indeed, she had
been an adept from the beginning. Her walls were covered by the
well-known pomegranate or jasmine or sunflower patterns; her hangings
were of a mystic greenish-blue; her pictures were drawn either from the
Italian primitives or their modern followers. Celtic romance, Christian
symbolism, all that was touching, other-worldly, and obscure--our late
English form, in fact, of the great Romantic reaction--it was amid
influences of this kind that Lady Tranmore lived and fed her own
imagination. The dim, suggestive, and pathetic; twilight rather than
dawn, autumn rather than spring; yearning rather than fulfilment; "the
gleam" rather than noon-day: it was in this half-lit, richly colored
sphere that she and most of her friends saw the tent of Beauty pitched.

But Kitty would have none of it. She quoted French sceptical remarks
about the legs and joints of the Burne-Jones knights; she declared that
so much pattern made her dizzy; and that the French were the only nation
in the world who understood a <i>salon</i>, whether as upholstery or
conversation. Accordingly, in days when these things were rare, the girl
of eighteen made her new husband provide her with white-panelled walls,
lightly gilt, and with a Persian carpet of which the mass was of a
plain, blackish gray, and only the border was allowed to flower. A few
Louis-Quinze girandoles on the walls, a Vernis-Martin screen, an old
French clock, two or three inlaid cabinets, and a collection of lightly
built chairs and settees in the French mode--this was all she would
allow; and while Lady Tranmore's room was always crowded, Kitty's, which
was much smaller, had always an air of space. French books were
scattered here and there; and only one picture was admitted. That was a
Watteau sketch of a group from "L'Embarquement pour Cythere." Kitty
adored it; Lady Tranmore thought it absurd and disagreeable.

As she entered the room now, on this May afternoon, she looked round it
with her usual distaste. On several of the chairs large illustrated
books were lying. They contained pictures of seventeenth and eighteenth
century costume--one of them displayed a colored engraving of a
brilliant Madame de Pompadour