His dome bed was yellow as to its upper works, with crimson valances above and yellow valances below. The yellow-lined crimson curtains (of course never closed) had green cords and tassels, and the counterpane was yellow. This bed was a modest sample of the careful and uncompromising reconstitution of a period which he had everywhere carried out in his abode.

The drawing-room, with its moulded ceiling and huge recessed window, had presented an admirable field for connoisseurship. Here the clash of rich primary colours, the perpendiculars which began with bronze girls' heads and ended with bronze girls' feet or animals' claws, the vast flat surfaces of furniture, the stiff curves of wood and a drapery, the morbid rage for solidity which would employ a candelabrum weighing five hundredweight to hold a single wax candle, produced a real and imposing effect of style; it was a style debased, a style which was shedding the last graces of French Empire in order soon to appeal to a Victoria determined to be utterly English and good; but it was a style. And G.J. had scamped no detail. Even the pictures were hung with thick tasselled cords of the Regency. The drawing-room was a triumph.

Do not conceive that G.J. had lost his head about furniture and that his notion of paradise was an endless series of second-hand shops. He had an admirable balance; and he held that a man might make a faultless interior for himself and yet not necessarily lose his balance. He resented being called a specialist in furniture. He regarded himself as an amateur of life, and, if a specialist in anything, as a specialist in friendships. Yet he was a solitary man (liking solitude without knowing that he liked it), and in the midst of the perfections which he had created he sometimes gloomily thought: "What in the name of God am I doing on this earth?"

He went into the drawing-room, and there, by the fire and in front of a formidable blue chair whose arms developed into the grinning heads of bronze lions, stood the lacquered table consecrated to his breakfast tray; and his breakfast tray, with newspaper and correspondence, had been magically placed thereon as though by invisible hands. And on one arm of the easy-chair lay the rug which, because a dressing-gown does not button all the way down, he put over his knees while breakfasting in winter. Yes, he admitted with pleasure that he was "well served". Before eating he opened the piano—a modern instrument concealed in an ingeniously confected Regency case—and played with taste a Bach prelude and fugue.

His was not the standardised and habituated kind of musical culture which takes a Bach prelude and fugue every morning before breakfast with or without a glass of Lithia water or fizzy saline. He did, however, customarily begin the day at the piano, and on this particular morning he happened to play a Bach prelude and fugue.

And as he played he congratulated himself on not having gone to seek Christine in the Promenade on the previous night, as impatience had tempted him to do. Such a procedure would have been an error in worldliness and bad from every point of view. He had wisely rejected the temptation.