VIVIE AND NORIE

The date when this story begins is a Saturday afternoon in June, 1900, about 3 p.m.  The scene is the western room of a suite of offices on the fifth floor of a house in Chancery Lane, the offices of Fraser and Warren, Consultant Actuaries and Accountants.  There is a long window facing west, the central part of which is open, affording a passage out on to a parapet.  Through this window, and still better from the parapet outside, may be seen the picturesque spires and turrets of the Law Courts, a glimpse here and there of the mellow, red-brick, white-windowed houses of New Square, the tree-tops of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the hint beyond a steepled and chimneyed horizon of the wooded heights of Highgate.  All this outlook is flooded with the brilliant sunshine of June, scarcely dimmed by the city smoke and fumes.

In the room itself there are on each of the tables vases of flowers and a bunch of dark red roses on the top of the many pigeon-holed bureau at which Vivien Warren is seated.  The walls are mainly covered with book-shelves well filled with consultative works on many diverse subjects.  There is another series of shelves crowded with neat, green, tin boxes containing the papers of clients.  A dark green-and-purple portiere partly conceals the entry into a washing place which is further fitted with a gas stove for cooking and cupboards for crockery and provisions.  At the opposite end of the room is a door which opens into a small bedroom.  The fireplace in the main room is fitted with the best and least smelly kind of gas stove obtainable in 1900.

There are two square tables covered with piles of documents neatly tied with green tape and ranged round the central vase of flowers; a heavy, squat earthenware vase not easily knocked over; and there is a second bureau with pigeon-holes and a roll top, similar to the one at which Vivien Warren is seated.  This is for the senior partner, Honoria Fraser.  Between the bureaus there is plenty of space for access to the long west window and consequently to the parapet which can be used like a balcony.  Two small arm-chairs in green leather on either side of the fireplace, two office chairs at the tables and a revolving chair at each bureau complete the furniture of the partners’ room of Fraser and Warren as you would have seen it twenty years ago.

The rest of their offices consisted of a landing from which a lift and a staircase descended, a waiting-room for clients, pleasantly furnished, a room in which two female clerks worked, and off this a small room tenanted by an office boy.  You may also add in imagination an excellent lavatory for the clerks, two telephones (one in the partners’ room), hidden safes, wall-maps; and you must visualize everything as pleasing in colour—­green, white, and purple—­flooded with light; clean, tidy, and admirably adapted for business in the City.