When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed "Oh—my darling Wally!"—in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we could not fathom, but judged to be painful.
We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary; but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy, who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least elated, but only at his ease.
He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner. Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the confrère gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her little baffling smile and her look—the look she was to have for long enough—of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.
He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.
We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once, before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless you're alone with it."
I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking, delicate things.
We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is too awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at, but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it, so that I asked her what she thought it meant.
"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do it all himself. She hasn't cared."
I said, it looked as if he hadn't cared.
She moaned, "Oh, but he did—he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must have spent on it!"