As she looked around her eyes seemed to light up everything.
"It's easy to see that you've been racing all over the earth, sir. That Neapolitan girl on the mantelpiece came from Rome, didn't she?"
"She did."
"And that lamp from Venice, and that silver bowl from Cairo, and that cedar-wood photograph frame from Sorrento?"
"Quite right."
"Books! Books! Books! All law books, I see. Not a human thing among them, I'll be bound. And yet they're all terribly, fearfully, tragically human, I suppose?"
"That's so."
"Gas fire? So you have a gas fire for the cold wet nights?"
"Yes, a bachelor has to have...." But another stabbing memory came, and he could get no further.
"And so this is where you sit alone until all hours of the night—reading, reading, reading?"