were reflected the row of old white china birds, that were seated, each on its own rock, on the shelf in front of it.  Family portraits in frames whose charm of design and colour made atonement for the indifference of the painting, alternated with brown landscapes in which castles, bridges, and impenetrable groves were dimly to be discovered through veils of varnish; flotillas of miniatures had settled, like groups of flies, wherever on the crowded walls foothold could be found, and water-colours, pencil-drawings, and photographs, rilled any remaining space.  There were long and implacable sofas, each with its conventional sofa-table in front of it; Empire consoles, with pieces of china incredibly diverse in style, beauty, and value, jostling each other on the marble slabs; woolwork screens, worked by forgotten aunts and grandmothers, chairs of every known breed, and tables, tables everywhere, and not a corner on one of them on which anything more could be deposited.  The claims of literature were acknowledged, but without enthusiasm.  A tall, glass-fronted cupboard, inaccessibly placed behind the elongated tail of an early grand piano, was filled with ornate miniature editions of the classics, that would have defied an effort—­had such ever been made—­to remove them from their shelves, whereon they had apparently been bedded in cement, like mosaic.  It was a room that, in its bewildering diversity, might have broken the hearts of housemaids or decorators; untidy, without plan, with rubbish contending successfully with museum-pieces, with the past and present struggling in their eternal rivalry; yet, a human place, a place full of the magnetism that is born of past happiness, a place to which all its successive generations of sons and daughters looked back with that softening of the heart that comes, when in, perhaps, a far-away country, memories of youth return, and with them the thought of home.  The ladies who, constant to the saner pleasures of conversation and tea, had disposed themselves round and about Lady Isabel’s tea-table, were of the inner circle of the friends of the house, and owned, as is usually the case where habits and environment are practically identical, a common point of view, and no more diversity of opinion than is enough to stimulate conversation.  Such of them as had compelled husbands or sons to accompany them, had shaken them off at the lawn tennis ground, and though loud cawings from the hall indicated that certain of the more elderly males had congregated there, the ladies in the drawing-room had, so far, been “unmolested by either the young people or the men.”

Thus, Miss Frederica Coppinger phrased it to those of her allies with whom she was now holding sweet communion.  The allies, albeit separated by intervals of from five to ten miles of rough and often hilly road, met with sufficient frequency to keep touch, yet not often enough to crush the ultimate fragrance from the flower of gossip.  Their most recent meeting had taken place at the concert, which had been Larry’s last achievement before his return to Oxford, and although they had not been oppressively hampered by the convention of silence at such entertainments, conversation had been necessarily somewhat thwarted.