Thomas Featherstone seldom used any other room but this. He possessed a drawing-room: a bleak chill shrine of the middle-class elegancies where the twittering Victorian niece who kept house for him—a characterless worthy woman with the red nose which bespeaks a defective digestion—was wont to dispense tepid tea and flabby muffins on her periodical “At Home” days. He had no study: he had his office for his work, he said, and that was enough for him. He had been brought up to sit in the dining-room at home in his father’s, the ship-chandler’s, house in Stepney, and he had carried the custom with him into the days of his prosperity.
So there he had sat, evening after evening, with his gold spectacles perched on his high nose, reading “Lloyd’s List” and the commercial columns of “The Times,”
