We said we hadn’t, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once, before anybody else did.  “You can’t see it properly,” he said, “unless you’re alone with it.”

I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it in any other way.  He had spared our decency.  And yet I think we hated him for having sent us there.  It was as if he had sent us to look at something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking, delicate things.

We looked at it, and we looked at each other.  We didn’t speak, and I don’t think either of us smiled.  I remember Norah going behind me and closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that she and I had to deal with alone.  I remember her saying then, “This is too awful!” not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at, but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it, so that I asked her what she thought it meant.

“It means,” she said, “that Jimmy’s done it all himself.  He’s had to do it all himself.  She hasn’t cared.”

I said, it looked as if he hadn’t cared.

She moaned, “Oh, but he did—­he did.  He’s cared so awfully.  That’s the dreadful part of it.  You can see he has.  Just look at those vases and those cabinets and things.  And think of the money the poor thing must have spent on it!”

“But,” I said, “it’s so unlike him.  His taste for furniture’s impeccable.  The old house was perfect.  So, in its way, was the cottage.”

“I’m afraid that wasn’t Jimmy’s taste—­it was Vee-Vee’s.  She did everything.”

“She told us he did.”

“Poor darling—­she wanted us to think he did.”

“He appreciated it, anyhow.”

“He’d appreciate anything if she did it.”

“Then,” I said, “why should he break loose like this now?”

“Because she hasn’t cared.  She hasn’t cared a hang.  She’s left everything to him.  And you can see, poor dear, how he’s spread himself.”

Oh, yes, you could see.  It was as if he had never had scope before, and now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok.  It wasn’t that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine things.  It was the awful way he’d mixed them, yielding incontinently to each solicitation as it came along.  Dealers had been on the look-out for Jimmy to exploit his fury.

In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea.  But not here.  And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested to him that you could mix things.  So, using a satinwood suite with tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved