tic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its
solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston
Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either
Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could
live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from
the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide
invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after
their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the
suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street
and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre
symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its
atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on
the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved
with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and
of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed
breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this
immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of
their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified
attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a
religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the
Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They
utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation,
punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is
Mrs. Eliott's day.

The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of
trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries
met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the
place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled
by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian
furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were
great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and
cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid
profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years
of