ttling away to greet another guest, and the
_confrere_ gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort
of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her
little baffling smile and her look--the look she was to have for long
enough--of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark
blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and
her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how
she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others
came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger
strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all
comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet
with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.

He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.

We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once,
before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless
you're alone with it."

I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us
miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone
with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it
in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him
for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at
something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking,
delicate things.

We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I
don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and
closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that
she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is
_too_ awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at,
but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it,
so that I asked her what she thought it meant.

"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do
it all himself. She hasn't _cared_."

I said, it looked as if _he_ hadn't cared.

She moaned, "Oh, but he did--he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the
dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and
those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must
have spent on it!"

"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable.
The old house was perfect. So, in its