t was not her place to come in, but occasionally, because
something had happened to Braiding, she did come in. She drew the
curtains apart, and the day of Vigo Street, pale, dirty, morose,
feebly and perfunctorily took possession of the bedroom. Mrs.
Braiding, having drawn the curtains, returned to the door and from the
doorway said:

"Breakfast is practically ready, sir."

G.J. perceived that this was one of her brave, resigned mornings.
Since August she had borne the entire weight of the war on her back,
and sometimes the burden would overpower her, but never quite. G.J.
switched on the light, arose from his bed, assumed his dressing-gown,
and, gazing with accustomed pleasure round the bedroom, saw that it
was perfect.

He had furnished his flat in the Regency style of the first decade
of the nineteenth century, as matured by George Smith, "upholder
extraordinary to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales". The Pavilion
at Brighton had given the original idea to G.J., who saw in it the
solution of the problem of combining the somewhat massive dignity
suitable to a bachelor of middling age with the bright, unconquerable
colours which the eternal twilight of London demands.

His dome bed was yellow as to its upper works, with crimson valances
above and yellow valances below. The yellow-lined crimson curtains (of
course never closed) had green cords and tassels, and the counterpane
was yellow. This bed was a modest sample of the careful and
uncompromising reconstitution of a period which he had everywhere
carried out in his abode.

The drawing-room, with its moulded ceiling and huge recessed window,
had presented an admirable field for connoisseurship. Here the clash
of rich primary colours, the perpendiculars which began with bronze
girls' heads and ended with bronze girls' feet or animals' claws,
the vast flat surfaces of furniture, the stiff curves of wood and a
drapery, the morbid rage for solidity which would employ a candelabrum
weighing five hundredweight to hold a single wax candle, produced a
real and imposing effect of style; it was a style debased, a style
which was shedding the last graces of French Empire in order soon to
appeal to a Victoria determined to be utterly English and good; but
it was a style. And G.J. had scamped no detail. Even the pictures were
hung with thick tasselled cords of the Regency. The drawing-room was a
triumph.

Do not conceive that G.J. had lost his head about furniture and