THE greatest of the parlourmaids came from the hall into the drawing-room at Eastmead the high, square temple of mahogany and tapestry¹ in which, the last few years, Mrs. Beever had spent much time in rejoicing that she had never set up new gods. She had left it, from the first, as it was full of the old things that, on succeeding to her husband’s mother, she had been obliged, as a young woman of that period, to accept as dolefully different from the things thought beautiful by other young women whose views of drawing-rooms, all about her, had also been intensified² by marriage. She had not unassistedly discovered the beauty of her heritage, and she had not from any such subtle suspicion kept her hands off it. She had never in her life taken any course with regard to any object for reasons that had so little to do with her duty. Everything in her house stood, at an angle of its own, on the solid rock of the discipline rt had cost her. She had therefore lived with mere³ dry wist-fulness through the age of rosewood, and had been rewarded by finding that, like those who sit still in runaway⁴ vehicles, she was the only person not thrown out. Her mahogany had never moved, but the way people talked about it had, and the people who talked were now eager to sit down with her on everything that both she and they had anciently thought plainest and poorest. It was Jean, above all, who had opened her eyes opened them in particular to the great wine-dark doors, polished and silver-hinged, with which the lady of Eastmead, arriving at the depressed⁵ formula that they were “gloomy,” had for thirty years, prudently⁶ on the whole, as she considered, shut out the question of taste. One of these doors Manning now softly closed, standing⁷, however, with her hand on the knob and looking across, as if, in the stillness, to listen at another which exactly balanced with it on the opposite side of the room. The light of the long day had not wholly faded, but what remained of it was the glow of the western sky, which showed through the wide, high window that was still open to the garden. The sensible

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