large old-fashioned house with a considerable amount of
ground round it. Some day when Ascher is dead the house will be pulled
down and the grounds cut up into building plots. In the meanwhile Ascher
holds it. I suppose it suits him. Neither he nor Mrs. Ascher cares for
fashionable life, and a Mayfair address has no attraction for them. The
few artistic and musical people whom they wish to know are quite willing
to go to Hampstead. Every one else who wants to see Ascher, and a good
many people do, calls at his office or dines with him in a club. Ascher
knows most of the chief men in the political world, for instance, but
even Prime Ministers are not often invited to the house at Golders
Hill. If Ascher really controls them, as Gorman says, he does so without
allowing them to interfere with his private life.

The house and its appointments impressed me greatly. The architecture
was Georgian, a style familiar to any one who has lived much in Dublin.
It gave me a feeling of spaciousness and dignity. The men who built
these houses knew what it was to live like gentlemen. I can imagine them
guilty of various offences against the code of Christian morality, but
I do not think they can ever have been either fussy or mean. There is
a restlessness about our fashionable imitations of the older kinds of
English domestic architecture. Our picturesque gables, dormer windows
and rooms with all sorts of odd angles, our finicky windows stuck high
up in unexpected parts of walls, our absurd leaded diamond panes and
crooked metal fastenings, all make for fussiness of soul. Nor can I
believe that people who live under ceilings which they can almost touch
ever attain a great and calm outlook upon life.

There was nothing "artistic" about Ascher's house. This surprised me
at first. I did not, of course, expect that Mrs. Ascher would have
surrounded herself with the maddening kind of furniture which is
distinguished by its crookedness and is designed by men who find their
inspiration by remembering the things which they see in nightmares. Nor
did I think it likely that she would have crammed her rooms with those
products of the east which are imported into this country by house
furnishers with reputations for aestheticism. I knew that she had
passed that stage of culture. But I did expect to find the house full
of heavily embroidered copes of mediaeval bishops, hung on screens;
candlesticks looted from Spanish monasteries, standing on curio