He sniffed London all day with a home-returning satisfaction in her solidity and her ugliness and her low-toned fogs and her great throbbing unostentatious importance, which the more flippant capital seemed to have intensified in him.  He ordered the most British luncheon he could think of, and reflected upon the superiority of the beer.  He read the leaders in the Standard through to the bitter end, and congratulated himself and the newspaper that there was no rag of an absurd feuilleton to distract his attention from the importance of the news of the day.  He remembered all sorts of acquaintances that Paris had foamed over for months; his heart warmed to a certain whimsical old couple who lived in Park Street and went out to walk every morning after breakfast with their poodle.  He felt disposed to make a formal call upon them and inquire after the poodle.  It was—­perhaps with an unconscious desire to make rather more of the idyl of his homecoming that he went to see the Cardiffs instead, who were his very old friends, and lived in Kensington Square.

As he turned out of Kensington High Street into a shoppy little thoroughfare, and through it to this quiet, neglected high-nosed old locality, he realized with an added satisfaction that he had come back to Thackeray’s London.  One was apt, he reflected, with a charity which he would not have allowed himself always, to undervalue Thackeray in these days.  After all, he once expressed London so well that now London expressed him, and that was something.

Kendal found the Cardiffs—­there were only two, Janet and her father—­at tea, and the Halifaxes there, four people he could always count on to be glad to see him.  It was written candidly in Janet’s face—­she was a natural creature—­as she asked him how he dared to be so unexpected.  Lady Halifax cried out robustly from the sofa to know how many pictures he had brought back; and Miss Halifax, full of the timid enthusiasm of the well-brought-up elderly English girl, gave him a sallow but agreeable regard from under her ineffective black lace hat, and said what a surprise it was.  When they had all finished, Lawrence Cardiff took his elbow off the mantelpiece, changed his cup into his other hand to shake hands, and said, with his quiet, clean-shaven smile, “So you’re back!”

“Daddy has been hoping you would be here soon,” said Miss Cardiff.  “He wants the support of your presence.  He’s been daring to enumerate ‘Our Minor Artists’ in the Brown Quarterly, and his position is perfectly terrible.  Already he’s had forty-one letters from friends, relatives, and picture-dealers suggesting names he has ’doubtless forgotten.’  Poor daddy says he never knew them.”

“Has he mentioned me?” asked Kendal, sitting down squarely with his cup of tea.

“He has not.”

“Then it’s in the character of the uncomplaining left-over that I’m wanted, the modest person who waits until he’s better.  I refuse to act.  I’ll go over to the howling majority.”