Humphrey had always imagined that Elizabeth lived in a flat with some woman-friend: he was surprised when he found the address led to a little white house, one of a row of such houses, in a broad, peaceful road at the back of Kensington High Street. It was one of those houses that must have been built when Kensington was a village; it was like a cottage in the heart of London. The Virginian creeper made its drapery of green over the trellis-work that framed the window, and the walls were green with ivy. An elderly woman opened the door to his knock, and he found himself in a low-ceilinged hall, with a few black-and-white drawings on the walls, and a reproduction of Whistler's Nocturne.
He was ushered into the sitting-room. Even if he had not known that it was her house, he could have chosen this room, out of all the rooms in London, as the room of Elizabeth Carr. Wherever he looked, he found a reflex of her peace and gentle calm.
In the few moments of waiting he took in all the details of the room: the soft-toned wall-paper, with a woodland frieze of blue and delicate shades of green, the old Japanese prints on the walls, and the little leather-bound books on the tables here and there. He had sat so many times in the rooms of different people whom he went to interview, that his observation had trained itself mechanically to notice such details. He heard a rustle on the stairs, the door opened gently, and Elizabeth Carr came into the room.
She looked as beautiful as a picture in the frame of her own room. So had he imagined her, her hair looped back from its centre parting piled in gleaming coils just above the nape of her neck, leaving its delicate outline unbroken; a long necklet of amethysts made a mauve rivulet against the whiteness of her bosom till it fell in a festoon over her bodice, and blended with the colour of her dress, amethystine itself. And in her hair there gleamed a comb beaten by a Norwegian goldsmith, and set with moonstone and chrysoprase.
She came forward to greet him, moving with the subtle grace of womanhood. Her charm, her frank beauty, filled him with a peculiar sense of unworthiness and embarrassment. Before the wonder of her, before the purity of her, everything else in life seemed incomprehensibly sordid.
"I am so glad you were able to come," she said. She looked him in the eyes as she spoke, and there was this, he noticed, about Elizabeth Carr: she meant every word she said—even the most trivial of greetings took on significance when she uttered them. Her words gave him confidence.
"It was good of you to ask me...." There was a slight pause. "I nearly missed the house," he said with an inconsequential smile. "I always thought you lived in a flat."
"Did you?" she replied. "Oh no!—(Do sit down—I'm expecting some more visitors shortly.) I've had this house for a long time." She sighed. "It's an inheritance, you know, and I thought I'd live in it myself, instead of letting it. Kenneth and I have dreadful squabbles—he says it's too far out for him, and wants me to keep a flat with him in town—and I loathe flats. I've got a small garden at the back, and it's blessed in the summer. There's a walnut tree and a pear tree just wide enough apart to hold a hammock."