She said, ‘I have often thought it would be interesting if the front of any house, but of an hotel especially, could be swung open on a hinge like the front of a doll’s house. Imagine the hundreds of rooms with their walls lit up and the real-looking staircase and all the people surprised doing appropriate things in appropriate attitudes as though they had been put there to represent something and had never moved in their lives. Like the cook-doll that I always had propped up against the kitchen stove and the father-doll propped against the library book-shelves and the sitting-up doll in the bath that was really a china ornament and had no other attitude, and the limp dolls that wouldn’t do anything so had to be kept in the spare-room beds, which I always think was an unconscious reflection on the ideal habits for visitors.’

‘Yes,’ said James Milton, for whom the Hotel was at once in miniature. ‘If one could see people all at once like that they wouldn’t matter so much.’ Quite apart from and yet somehow parallel with the intellectual conception he had another idea of God of which he permitted himself to be conscious, as of an enormous and perpetually descending Finger and Thumb. What Sydney had just said fitted in with this alarmingly.

‘If one could see them like that,’ she continued, ‘one could see them so clearly as living under the compulsion of their furniture – or the furniture they happen to have hired. It would seem very doubtful, I dare say, whether man were not, after all, made for the Sabbath; and worse, for beds and dinner-tables and washstands, just to discharge the obligations all those have created.’

‘I don’t think I should ever believe that,’ said Milton, amused.

‘Well, just think of this,’ she continued. ‘Though it may have been an Idea in the first place that made churches be built, it was the churches already existing, with rows of pews for people to sit in and a pulpit and things all ready that had to be filled, that made you into a parson.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t agree with you at all,’ said he with a finality that impressed her.