So when the barrister was away, Mary, after she had first taken off her shawl and hung it on a chair, and then looked at herself in the glass over the mantelpiece, and arranged her hair a little, began to examine her surroundings with considerable interest. She noticed how different everything in this room was to what she was accustomed to see in other sitting-rooms at home and elsewhere, where a woman's influence—though it were even Mrs. Grimm's—made itself felt.
There was a comfortable sternness about the bachelor's sanctum. There were no frivolous cheap china shepherdesses on the mantelpiece, as in the Brixton parlour, but pipes, tobacco-jars, and two bronze busts of heathen deities.
There hung by the side of the mirror four tin shields with the arms of Hudson's University, College, School, and Inn of Court painted on them. The walls were pannelled with dark oak. There were two carved bookshelves of the same wood, and their contents showed that his erratic and rather superficial mind had coquetted with many branches of human thought.
Some good old engravings hung on the walls, contrasting curiously with coloured photographs by Goupil from well-known pictures of the modern French school, all representing feminine beauty in more or less scanty classic attire, these last in broad flat frames of dead gold that much relieved the sombre effect of the furniture.
There were guns, fishing-rods and riding-whips also hanging on the walls, proving that our barrister was somewhat of a sportsman as well as a student and voluptuary.
In a recess were some silver prize-tankards won by his oar on Cam and Thames. On the round table in the centre of the room were a decanter of whisky, two or three empty glasses, some cigar ends in a saucer, an album chiefly filled with pretty actresses, a French novel, and one brief, the only sign of his profession; for I must explain that Hudson had a room for business purposes on the ground-floor of his staircase.
Mary heard her host coming up the stairs, so had one more look into the glass to see if all was right. Her eye fell on her hat—it was very shabby indeed; so, though she felt how cool and bold she was, she took it off and laid it on the chair with her shawl. Her shame for its appearance, her woman's vanity, were too much for her instinctive feeling that this was far from the right thing to do.
When Hudson came in he was surprised to see what a beautiful creature this little captive of his was. Now that her shawl was off, her tight-fitting black dress revealed the perfect moulding of her form. Her small classical head was set on her shoulders wonderfully as that of the Venus that came from Milo. She was leaning with one arm on the sill of the window, looking across Fountain Court to the gleaming Thames. The lamp shining through a coloured shade cast a delicate pink light upon her figure, and she appeared even as the young Venus, a being born into a happy world only to be loved and to love.
But then no goddess of Love would have had that expression about the mouth, so untender, so devoid of soft emotions.
"I am sorry to have kept you so long," Hudson said. "I have ordered a nice little supper, which will be here directly."