"And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Waterlow; "but one who doesn't bark at you, so that you can be assured of your identity. I am really more aware of my own in this room than in any I've lived in for years. It is like one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms weren't so important then as they are now, and the people who lived in them, I sometimes think, were more so. It amuses me nowadays," said the old lady moving to her tea-table and seating herself, "to observe the way in which people are assessed by their tastes and their belongings. You say of some one that she is a dull or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and rebuke you receive is, 'Oh, but she has such wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down here, Mr. Stacpole. It is very nice to see you again."
"But tell me, where is the other room?" Owen asked, drawing his chair to the table, "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone for ever?"
Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of half-malicious mystery.
"That is a secret, my own little secret, just as this room is, in a way, a little joke which, for my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was finished last week, by the way, and you are the first person to see it. Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow, with bland inconsequence.
"Yes; I'm only passing through. Gwendolen's been gone for nearly a month."
"Yes; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still with the genial blandness. "And as to our little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is in many ways a room of my girlhood. The furniture was my mother's, and Cicely, when the idea struck her, had it brought from the garret of my old home, where it has stood in disgrace for many a year. She has been clever about it, hasn't she?"
"It's genius," said Owen, "What made her think of it?" And then, with a pang, he wondered whether Gwendolen had thought of it first. Was it imaginable that Gwendolen could have turned away from beauty and plunged herself into such gay austerities of ugliness?
"Well, things are in the air, you know," said Mrs. Waterlow, pouring out the tea,--"that's what Cicely always says, at all events,--reactions, repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, she says, a discipline."
"Things in the air": had Gwendolen felt them first, and Mrs. Waterlow felt them after her? This question of priority became of burning interest for him.