"What were you saying?" he questioned nervously.
"I was calling your attention to this room. Look at it. If you didn't, at heart, hate all change—all innovation, you couldn't have lived here this long without having altered it."
"Altered it—why?"
Conscience laughed. "Well, because it's all unspeakably depressing, for one thing. Outside of prisons, I doubt if there is anything drearier in the world than Landseer engravings in black frames and fantastically grained pine trying to be oak—unless it's hair-cloth sofas and portraits that have turned black."
The lord of the manor spoke in a crestfallen manner, touched with perplexity. To what was all this a preamble?
"That portrait is of an ancestor of mine," he said and his wife once more laughed, though this time his anxiety fancied there was irony in it. "All right," she said, "but wouldn't it have been quite as respectful and much more cheerful to send him on a visit to some painter who takes in dingy ancestors and does them over?"
"I hadn't thought of it," he acknowledged, but the idea did not seem to delight him.
"No." They were still standing, she facing the table and he facing her, making of his shoulders as wide a screen as possible.
Now she moved and stood with the fingers of one hand resting lightly on the spot where lay a profusion of scattered sheets and envelopes. These were papers which, should she see and recognize them—granting that she had not already done so—would spell divorce or separation. Tollman drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. At the price of any concession he must get her out of that room for five minutes!
"No," she went on. "It hadn't occurred to you, because you really dislike all change. You are a reactionary ... and I'm afraid I'm what you'd call a radical."