The drawing-room was large and bright, with four narrow, deeply recessed windows commanding the broad street and the Antelope Hotel over the way, and deep window seats crammed with flowers. Here the oak panelling had been painted pale pink, and the mouldings picked out in a deeper tint by successive generations of Vandals, but the effect was cheerful, and the pink walls made a good background for the Chippendale secretaires and cabinets filled with willow-pattern Worcester or Crown Derby. The window-curtains were dark brown cloth, with a border of Berlin wool lilies and roses, a border which would have set the teeth of an æsthete on edge, but which blended with the general brightness of the room. Old Mrs. Matthew Dalbrook, the grandmother, and her three spinster daughters had toiled over these cross-stitch borders, and Theodore’s mother would have deemed it sacrilege to have put aside this labour of a vanished life.
Harrington Dalbrook and his two sisters were in the drawing-room, each apparently absorbed in an instructive book, and yet all three had been talking for the greater part of the evening. It was a characteristic of their highly intellectual lives to nurse a volume of Herbert Spencer or a treatise upon the deeper mysteries of Buddha, while they discussed the conduct or morals of their neighbours—or their gowns and bonnets.
“I thought you were never coming home, Theo,” said Janet. “You don’t mean to say you waited to see the bride and bridegroom?”
“That is exactly what I do mean to say. I had to get old Sandown’s lease executed, and when I had finished my business I waited about to see them arrive. Do you think you could get me anything in the way of supper, Janie?”
“Father went to bed ever so long ago,” replied Janet; “it’s dreadfully late.”
“But I don’t suppose the cook has gone to bed, and perhaps she would condescend to cut me a sandwich or two,” answered Theodore, ringing the bell.
His sisters were orderly young women, who objected to eating and drinking out of regulation hours. Janet looked round the room discontentedly, thinking that her brother would make crumbs. Young men, she had observed, are almost miracle workers in the way of crumbs. They can get more superfluous crumbs out of any given piece of bread than the entire piece would appear to contain, looked at by the casual eye.
“I have found a passage in Spencer which most fully bears out my view, Theodore,” said Sophia, severely, referring to an argument she had had with her brother the day before yesterday.
“How did she look?” asked Janet, openly frivolous for the nonce.
“Lovelier than I ever saw her look in her life,” answered Theodore. “At least I thought so.”