—"Or as if he were just nobody, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an airman, good gracious!"
Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.
The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed with names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly opposite a cream-coloured door with a small, old-fashioned brass knocker, polished like gold.
Paul Dampier tapped sharply at it.
The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes and with the face of a wooden sphinx.
"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his shoulder, as the trio passed in.
The long sitting-room occupied half the flat and its windows took up the whole of one side. It was to these open windows that Gwenna turned.
"Oh, what a view!" she cried, looking out, enraptured at the height and airiness, looking past the leads, with their wooden tubs of standard laurel-bushes, among which pigeons were strutting and bridling and pecking crumbs. She looked down, down, at the bird's-eye view of London, spread far below her in a map of grey roofs and green tree-tops under a soft mist of smoke that seemed of the clouds themselves.
"Oh, can't you see for miles!" exclaimed Gwenna. "There's St. Paul's, looks like a big grey soap-bubble, coming up out of the mist! Oh, you can see between a crack in the houses, our place at Westminster! It's like a cottage from here! Oh, and that iron lacey thing on the roof! Even this must be something like being up in an aeroplane, I should think! Look, Leslie!"
Miss Long seemed more engrossed in looking round Mr. Dampier's bachelor sitting-room. It was incredibly luxurious compared to what she'd expected. The polished floor was black and shiny as the wood of the piano at the further end, the Persian rugs softly brilliant. In the middle of the Adams mantelpiece simpered an exquisite Chelsea shepherdess; to the left and right of her there stood squat toys in ivory, old slender-stalked champagne-glasses holding sweet-peas. And upon the leaf-brown walls were decorations that seemed complacently to draw attention to the catholic taste of their owner. A rare eighteenth-century print of Tom Jones upon his knees, asking "forgiveness" of his Sophia, hung just above a Futurist's grimace in paint; and there was a frieze of ultra-modern French fashion-designs, framed in passe-partout, from the "Bon Ton."