ed the next day.

CHAPTER XXIV.

MRS. REDMAIN'S DRAWING-ROOM.

A few years ago, a London drawing-room was seldom beautiful; but size
is always something, and, if Mrs. Redmain's had not harmony, it had
gilding--a regular upholsterer's drawing-room it was, on which about as
much taste had been expended as on the fattening of a prize-pig.
Happily there is as little need as temptation to give any description
of it, with its sheets of glass and steel, its lace curtains,
crude-colored walls and floor and couches, and glittering chandeliers
of a thousand prisms. Everybody knows the kind of room--a huddle of the
chimera ambition wallowing in the chaos of the commonplace--no
miniature world of harmonious abiding. The only interesting thing in it
was, that on all sides were doors, which must lead out of it, and might
lead to a better place.

It was about eleven o'clock of a November morning--more like one in
March. There might be a thick fog before the evening, but now the sun
was shining like a brilliant lump of ice--so inimical to heat,
apparently, that a servant had just dropped the venetian blind of one
of the windows to shut his basilisk-gaze from the sickening fire, which
was now rapidly recovering. Betwixt the cold sun and the hard earth, a
dust-befogged wind, plainly borrowed from March, was sweeping the
street.

Mr. and Mrs. Redmain had returned to town thus early because their
country-place was in Cornwall, and there Mr. Redmain was too far from
his physician. He was now considerably better, however, and had begun
to go about again, for the weather did not yet affect him much. He was
now in his study, as it was called, where he generally had his
breakfast alone. Mrs. Redmain always had hers in bed, as often with a
new novel as she could, of which her maid cut the leaves, and skimmed
the cream. But now she was descending the stair, straight as a Greek
goddess, and about as cold as the marble she is made of--mentally
rigid, morally imperturbable, and vacant of countenance to a degree
hardly equaled by the most ordinary of goddesses. She entered the
drawing-room with a slow, careless, yet stately step, which belonged to
her, I can not say by nature, for it was not natural, but by ancestry.
She walked to the chimney, seated herself in a low, soft, shiny chair
almost on the hearth-rug, and gazed listlessly into the fire. In a
minute she rose and rang the bell.

"Send my maid, and shut the door," she said.