Sir Donald’s faded face acknowledged it.
“Sorry. I’ll go.”
“No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.”
Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
“I light it with wax candles,” said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
“It’s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.”
He struck a match on his boot.
“You like to shut out London,” he continued.
“Yes. Yet I live in it.”
“And hate it. So do I. London’s like a black-browed brute that gets an unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man. Yet one can’t get away from it.”