So much for Attaboy and the deserted room.
It has been remarked—without payment—by more than one philosopher that the great events of this world arrive through the action of agents who did not intend them. And this you will find to be true of Attaboy, of the Polar Bear, and the deserted West Room.
I think it only fair to add, since I am writing a detective story, that when Aunt Amelia visited her brother the Home Secretary, which was, all totted up, for something like a third of the year, she was given the principal guest room, known in the family as Bannockburn, which lay immediately above.
So much for Paulings and its now famous, then deserted, West Room; its Parrot, its Polar Bear.
I return to that winter week-end, that cold January Friday and the few gathered in the great drawing-room of Paulings round its tea table.
It was not a party: it was a family meeting of a very few people.
Dear Aunt, so good, so kind, and a little deaf.
Old Lady Bolter, a much elder sister of the Home Secretary, known among the Great as "Aunt Amelia," we have seen was half a permanency. She had already given them three weeks of herself a month before; and she had now settled down to another bout. They suffered her in this fashion often enough; but as for her, she knitted. I have read in one of those books which are published anonymously upon the people of that world, that she had been famous in King Edward's day for her wit. Maybe. She would hardly be famous for it now. However, she was not nearly so blind nor so deaf as she pretended to be. She had met most people up to the Great War and resembled a sheep.