“It was built by Kent in seventeen-forty for your great-great grandfather,” he explained. He was regarding it more affectionately. “Solid respectability was the dream, then.” Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not, perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton’s great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings. The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches, still capped its grim iron railings.!

“It’s many a year, I am afraid, to the final chapter,” thought their author. “I must go now,” she said in a harsh voice, and he released her.

该作者的其它作品 “Carleton will want him to make his food policy include Tariff Reform,” he said. “If he prove pliable, and is willing to throw over his free trade principles, all well and good.” “I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it,” she laughed, when at last he released her. “Do you know, you haven’t hugged me, Dad, since I was five years old. That’s nineteen years ago. You do love me, don’t you?”