The afternoon, at the end of a brilliant July, was delightful, and the Embankment, with its redbrick palaces and its little bit of old Chelsea, looked just the one perfect place in which to live; to live an idle, artistic life, bien intendu, and bask in sunshine reflected from blue water. The tide was at the flood, the gardens were full of gaudy July flowers.
“How horrid Fernhurst will be after this!” sighed Sophy. “What a lucky man Mr. Sefton is to have a house in Tite Street, as well as the Manor!”
“Ah, but it is only a bachelor den, remember,” said Eve. “He will do away with it when he marries.”
“Not if his wife has any sense—unless she makes him change it for a larger house facing the river.”
Mr. Sefton’s house was near the corner, and commanded a sidelong view of the Thames from all the front windows, and a still better view from an oriel in the library, which projected so as to rake the street. Sophy thought this small house in Tite Street, with its rich and sombre furniture and subdued colouring, one of the most enchanting houses she had ever entered, second only to the Manor House, which she had seen some years before on the never-to-be-forgotten occasion of a Primrose League garden-party given by Mr. Sefton in the interests of the cause. The Manor House and its splendours of art, its old gardens, and antique furniture, were the growth of centuries, and owed their existence to Seftons who were dust. This twelve-roomed house in Tite Street was an emanation of the man himself. His temperament, his education, his tastes were all embodied here. This was the pleasure dome which he had built for himself—this was his palace of art.
She went about peeping and peering at everything, escorted by Mr. Tivett, who expatiated and explained to his heart’s content, pointing out the workmanship which made a mahogany table as precious as jasper or ivory; the artistic form of those high-backed chairs, copied from an old French model; the Gobelin tapestry, which had neither the glow nor sheen of silken fabrics, and yet was six times as costly.
“This house of Sefton’s just serves to remind one of what a parvenu’s house is not,” said little Tivett, sententiously.
Sophy looked at the titles of the books. How ignorant they made her feel! There was hardly one that she had ever seen before; and yet no doubt they were the very cream of classic and modern literature, not to have read which stamped one as illiterate.
“I have been looking at your books,” she said, when Sefton came in with Eve. “They are too lovely.”
“Rather nicely bound, aren’t they?” he said, smiling gently at her enthusiasm. “They are a somewhat scratch collection, not quite family literature; but those vellum bindings with the blue labels give a nice tone of colour against the prevailing brown.”
“That is so like Sefton,” said Mr. Tivett. “He values his books from an aesthetic standpoint. Thinks of the effect of their bindings, not of the literature inside.”
“As one gets older reading becomes more and more impossible. There is a satisfaction in possessing books, but one’s chief pleasure is in their outsides. I sit here sometimes after midnight, smoking the pipe of the lotus-eater and looking at my bindings, and I feel as if that were enough for culture.”
“I dare say that is quite the pleasantest way of enjoying a library,” said Mr. Tivett, as if he saw the matter in a new light.
“Of course it is. There’s no use in thinking of the lifetime it would need to read all the great books. That way madness lies. De Quincey went into the question once arithmetically, and to read his bare statement is distraction. I think it was that calculation of his which first put me off reading.”
“Then your books are only ornaments?” said Sophy, disappointed.
“My books are a dado by Riviere and Zaehnsdorf. There are a great many of them with the leaves unopened. I take out a volume now and then, and peep between the pages. One gets the best of a book that way—the flavour without the substance of the author. But I came to take you down to tea, Miss Marchant. My banjoist has arrived, and Lady Hartley and Mrs. Montford are doing all they can to spoil him.”
“Is Lady Hartley here? How nice!” exclaimed Sophy, to whom Lady Hartley’s dress, manners, and way of thinking were a continual study.
Eve’s sister-in-law was Sophy’s ideal fine lady.
“Lady Hartley is always nice to me,” replied Sefton. “She never misses one of my afternoons if she is in town. She would sacrifice the Marlborough House garden-party for my tea and muffins.”
“Ah, but I dare say you contrive to make your tea-parties exceptional. This banjoist, now. Everybody is dying to hear him.”
They went down to tea, which was served in a little bit of a room at the back of the dining-room, from which it was divided only by a curtain of old Italian tapestry; a mere alcove in which eight or ten people made a mob. Flowers, ices, tea, chocolate, cakes, china, silver, damask embroidered by industrious Bavarians, everything was the choicest of its kind; and Mr. Sefton’s valet, with a footman and a smart parlourmaid, waited admirably. The squeeziness of the room made the entertainment all the more enjoyable. The banjoist stood in the centre of the crowd, talking in the true American style, with an incisive cleverness, and a clear metallic enunciation which made everybody else’s speech sound slipshod and slovenly.
People were amused and delighted. He told anecdotes, firing them off as fast as the crackers which demon boys explode on the pavement. The admiring circle forgot that his distinction was the banjo, and began to accept him as a wit. Mrs. Montford asked him
