tty. Something horrible, I think."

BOOK III

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

CHAPTER XXXVII

Mrs. Downey's boarding-house was the light of Tavistock Place,
Bloomsbury. In the brown monotony of the street it stood out splendid,
conspicuous. Its door and half its front were painted a beautiful, a
remarkable pea-green, while its door knob and door-knocker were of
polished brass. Mrs. Downey's boarding-house knew nothing of
concealment or disguise. Every evening, at the hour of seven, through
its ground-floor window it offered to the world a scene of stupefying
brilliance. The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing the
allurements of the interior.

From both sides of the street, the entire length of the dinner-table
was visible. Above it, a handsome gilt gaselier spread out its
branches, and on this gaselier as many as three gas-jets burned
furiously at once. In the intense illumination the faces of the
boarders could be distinctly seen. They sat, as it were, transfigured,
in a nebulous whorl or glory of yellow light. It fell on the high
collars, the quite remarkably high collars of the young gentlemen, and
on those gay, those positively hilarious blouses which the young
ladies at Mrs. Downey's wear. Beside the water-bottles and tumblers of
red glass it lay like a rosy shadow on the cloth. It gave back their
green again to the aspidistras that, rising from a ruche of pink
paper, formed the central ornament of the table. It made a luminous
body of Mrs. Downey's face. The graver values were not sacrificed to
this joyous expenditure of gas-light, for the wall-paper (the design
was in chocolate, on a ground of ochre) sustained the note of
fundamental melancholy. At the back of the apartment, immediately
behind Mrs. Downey, an immense mahogany sideboard shone wine-dark in a
gorgeous gloom. On the sideboard stood a Family Bible, and on the
Family Bible a tea-urn, a tea-urn that might have been silver. There
was design in this arrangement; but for the Bible the tea-urn would
have been obliterated by Mrs. Downey; thus elevated, it closed, it
crowned the vista with a beauty that was final, monumental and
supreme.

You had only to glance through those windows to see that Mrs. Downey's
combined the splendid publicity of an hotel with the refinements of a
well-appointed home. That it offered, together with a luxurious table,
the society of youthful persons of both sexes. And if everything
around Mrs. Downey wa