The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time.  Three centuries met in Mrs. Eliott’s drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the place.  Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects.  There were great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years of Eastern trade.  And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent culture.  The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met, Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of aspirations and enthusiasms.

It was five o’clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three.  That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.

There was nothing, in Miss Proctor’s opinion (if dear Fanny only knew it), so provincial as an enthusiasm.  As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be what you were not?  Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square’s preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever conscious of.  She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip.  She ignored Mrs. Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.

“I want,” said she, “the latest news of Anne.”

“If you wait, you may get it from herself.”

“My dear, do you suppose she’d give it me?”

“It depends,” said Mrs. Eliott, “on what you want to know.”

“I want to know whether she’s happy.  I want to know whether, by this time, she knows.”

“You can’t ask her.”

“Of course I can’t.  That’s why I’m asking you.”

“I know nothing.  I’ve hardly seen her.”

Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without Fanny Eliott’s help.

“Poor dear Anne.”

Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor dear Anne.