A man's room rather than a woman's, and, judging by
appearances, a bachelor's at that.--Eighteenth-century furniture, not
ignoble in line, but heavy, wide-seated, designed for the comfort of
bulky paunched figures arrayed in long napped waistcoats and full-skirted
coats. Tabaret curtains and upholsterings, originally maroon, now dulled
by sea damp and bleached by sun-glare to a uniform tone in which colour
and pattern were alike obliterated. Handsome copperplate engravings of
Pisa and of Rome, and pastel portraits in oval frames; the rest of the
whity brown panelled wall space hidden by book-cases. These surmounted by
softly shining, pearl-grey Chinese godlings, monsters, philosophers and
saints, the shelves below packed with neatly ranged books.
A dusky room, in spite of its rounded, outstanding sash-windows, two on
either side the glass door; the air of it holding, in permanent solution,
an odour of leather-bound volumes. A place, in short, which, though not
inhospitable, imposed itself, its qualities and traditions, to an extent
impossible for any save the most thick-skinned and thick-witted wholly to
ignore or resist.
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