“Yes.  He’s going down this term.”

“You see a good deal of him, I suppose?”

“Off and on,” said Peter.

“Of course,” said Hilary, “you’re almost half-brothers.  I do feel that the Urquharts owe us something, for the sake of the connexion.  I shall talk to Lord Evelyn about you.  He was very fond of your mother....  I am very sorry about you, Peter.  We must think it over sometime, seriously.”

He got up and began to walk about the room in his nervous, restless way, looking at Peter’s things.  Peter’s room was rather pleasing.  Everything in it had the air of being the selection of a personal and discriminating affection.  There was a serene self-confidence about Peter’s tastes; he always knew precisely what he liked, irrespective of what anyone else liked.  If he had happened to admire “The Soul’s Awakening” he would beyond doubt have hung a copy of it in his room.  What he had, as a matter of fact, hung in his room very successfully expressed an aspect of himself.  The room conveyed restfulness, and an immense love, innate rather than grafted, of the pleasures of the eye.  The characteristic of restfulness was conveyed partly by the fat green sofa and the almost superfluous number of extremely comfortable arm-chairs, and Peter’s attitude in one of them.  On a frame in a corner a large piece of embroidery was stretched—­a cherry tree in blossom coming to slow birth on a green serge background.  Peter was quite good at embroidery.  He carried pieces of it (mostly elaborately designed book-covers) about in his pockets, and took them out at tea-parties and (surreptitiously) at lectures.  He said it was soothing, like smoking; only smoking didn’t soothe him, it made him feel ill.  On days when he had been doing tiresome or boring or jarring things, or been associating with a certain type of person, he did a great deal of embroidery in the evenings, because, as he said, it was such a change.  The embroidery stood for a symbol, a type of the pleasures of the senses, and when he fell to it with fervour beyond the ordinary, one understood that he had been having a surfeit of the displeasures of the senses, and felt need to restore the balance.

Hilary stopped before a piece of extremely shabby, frayed and dingy tapestry, that had the appearance of having once been even dingier and shabbier.  It looked as if it had lain for years in a dusty corner of a dusty old shop, till someone had found it and been pleased by it and taken possession, loving it through its squalor.

“Rather nice,” said Hilary.  “Really good, isn’t it?”

Peter nodded.  “Gobelin, of the best time.  Someone told me that afterwards.  When I bought it, I only knew it was nice.  A man wanted to buy it from me for quite a lot.”

Hilary looked about him.  “You’ve got some good things.  How do you pick them up?”

“I try,” said Peter, “to look as if I didn’t care whether I had them or not.  Then they let me have them for very little.  The man I got that tapestry from didn’t know how nice it was.  I did, but I cheated him.”