"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable.
The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."
"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste—it was Vee-Vee's. She did everything."
"She told us he did."
"Poor darling—she wanted us to think he did."
"He appreciated it, anyhow."
"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."
"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"
"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."
Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for Jimmy to exploit his fury.
In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested to him that you could mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and eighteenth-century gilded bergère chairs to old oak and Chippendale. Cloisonné and Sèvres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.