Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/169

MR GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI 143 face facts, to know herself, to meet stark life — it is for this that she breaks away from all the mannered courtliness, and lights that pathetic cottage candle — " We've all been in too great a hurry getting civilized. False dawn. I mean to go back." Well, it certainly seems, when we follow her, as though the escape had been complete ; we push open the page and are in- stantly surrounded by the very atmosphere of Fact. The Office of Voysey and Son is in the best part of Lincoln's Inn. Mr. Voysey's own room, into which he walks about twenty past ten of a morning, radiates enterpHse besides. There is polish on everything ; on the windows, on the mahogany of the tidily packed wHting- table that stands between them, on the brass-work of the fire-place in the other wall, on the glass of the fire-screen which preserves only the pleasantness of a sparkling fire, even on Mr. Voysey's hat as he takes it off to place on the little red- curtained shelf behind the door. . . . The Voysey dining-room at Chislehurst, when children and grandchildren are visiting, is dining-table and very little else. And at this moment in the evening, when five or six men are sprawling back in their chairs, and the air is clouded with smoke, it is a very typical specimen of the middle-class English doinestic temple. . . . It has the usuAxl red-papered walls (like a reflection, they are, of the underdone beef so much consu^ned within tliem), the usual vai'nished woodwork which is known as grained oak ; there is the usual, hot, mahogafiy furniture ; and, commanding point of the whole room, there is the usual black marble sarcopJiagus of a fire-place. . . . On the mantelpiece stands, of course, a clock; at either end a china vase filled with paper spills. . . . Decidedly, this looks like Reality. No expense has been spared ; that is to say, no economy. It would have been so easy for our man of letters, fastidious and elegant, to have indulged his love of grace by introducing some amenities — for amenities there would be, even in chaste Chislehurst, even in the Chislehurst of the 'eighties, But he has deternjined there shq^ll