Killigrew, as a merchant’s son, however well off, could not penetrate to the most sacred precincts—­Motts was more or less barred to him; but on the other hand he was in the midst of what was always called the “Bohemian” set—­in which were many artists, both the big and the little fry.  One could “see life” there too, though, as usual, most of the artists were very respectable people.  It was a respectable art then in vogue in England.  Frith was the giant of the day, and from the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s to pictures such as the “Rake’s Progress” the plastic arts had a moral tendency.  Even the animals of Sir Edwin Landseer were the most decorous of all four-footed creatures; Killigrew blasphemed by calling the admired paintings still-life studies of animals.  But then Killigrew was from Paris and chanted the newer creed; he was always comparing London unfavourably with Paris even when he was showing it off most.

The house in Tavistock Square was grand beyond anything Ishmael had ever imagined, if a little dismal too.  It was furnished with a plethora of red plush, polished mahogany, and alabaster vases; while terrible though genuine curios from Mr. Killigrew’s foreign agents decorated the least likely places.  You were quite likely to be greeted, on opening your wardrobe, by a bland ostrich egg, which Mrs. Killigrew, the vaguest of dear women, would have thrust there and forgotten.  She had a deeply-rooted conviction that there was something indecent about an ostrich egg—­probably its size, emphasising that nakedness which nothing exhibits so triumphantly as an egg, had something to do with it.

Mrs. Killigrew was nothing if not “nice,” but she was something much better than that too.  Ishmael, though he could no more help laughing at her than could anyone else, soon felt a genuine affection for her that he never lost.  She was a little wide-eyed, wistful-looking woman, really supremely contented with life, and, though kindness itself, quite incapable of realising that anyone could ever really be unhappy or wicked.  “I’m sure the dear Lord knows what’s best for us all,” was her comfortable creed, that in one less sweet-natured would have made for selfishness.

“I’m sure that’ll be very nice, my dears,” was her invariable comment on any programme suggested by the young men; and there was a legend in the family that Killigrew—­or Joseph, as his mother always called him in full—­had once said to her:  “How would it be, mother, if I were to murder the Guv’nor and then take you round the world with me on the money?  We could settle in the South Sea Islands, and I’d marry a darky and you could look after the picaninny grandchildren?” To which Mrs. Killigrew had responded:  “Yes, dear, that will be very nice; and on your way, if you’re passing the fishmongers’, will you tell him to alter the salmon for this evening to cod, as your father won’t be in to dinner?”

Mr. Killigrew was a thin, pale man, not at all the typical prosperous merchant, with a skin like the shiny outside of a cold suet pudding, a high wall of forehead, and the thin-lipped mouth of a lawyer.  Perhaps it was because of that mouth he was such a successful trader, while the brow provided him with enough philosophy to bear gladly with a child so different from himself—­always a hard blow to egoism.