"Isn't exactly what?"
"A friend of Edith's."
CHAPTER VI
There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street and Thurston Square.
Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on the unlovely and unsacred street.
Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a religious protest against the spirit of business.
But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.
Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation, punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is Mrs. Eliott's day.
The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych with its saints in glory.