te to her in
her remoteness. She smiled faintly.

"What _does_ it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It
would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."

We went down, and the house-warming began.

It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by
visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed
it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could
to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup
administered during the first paroxysm.

We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity--their
emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where
the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his
suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family
portraits?

But the Thesigers (all except Charlie--and Charlie, Norah said, had no
heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners.
I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck
him--his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it.
And the Canon--

The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he
would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian
gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He
behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings,
as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his
natural background.

But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch
Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above
them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his
atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. _His_
behaviour was unsurpassable. For _his_ case, if you like, was desperate.
I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room.
He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger,
not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it
meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the
arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his
house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the
Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he
did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and
lamentable and expensive failure.

He had