The Surrenden library is well stored, an elegant and lettered lord of the eighteenth century having been a bibliophile. It is a charming room, panelled with inlaid woods, and with a ceiling painted after Tiepolo; the bookcases are built into the wall, so that the books look _chez eux_, and are not mere lodgers or visitors; oriel windows look out on to a portion of the garden laid out by Beaumont. One window has been cut down to the ground, an anachronism and innovation indeed, somewhat impairing the uniformity of the room. The present Lady Usk had it done, but one forgives her the sacrilege when one feels how pleasant it is to walk out from the mellow shadows of the library on to the smooth-shaven grass and gather a rose with one hand whilst holding an eighteenth-century author with the other. It is in the smaller library adjacent, filled with modern volumes, that five-o'clock tea is always to be had, with all the abundant demoralizing abominations of caviare, kümmel, etc. It is a gay room, with _dessus-des-portes_ after Watteau and every variety of couch and of lounging-chair. "Reading made easy" somebody calls it. But there is little reading done either in it or in the big library: Brandolin when he goes there finds himself usually alone, and can commune as he chooses with Latin philosophy and Gaulois wit. "You _used_ to read, George?" he says to his host, in expostulation. "Yes, I used,--ages ago," says Usk, with a yawn. Brandolin looks at him with curiosity. "I can understand a man who has never read," he replies, "but I cannot understand a man losing the taste for reading if he has ever had it. One can dwell contented in B[oe]otia if one has never been out of it, but to go back to B[oe]otia after living in Attica----" "It's one's life does it." "What life? One has the life one wishes." "That's the sort of thing a man says who hasn't married." "My dear George, you cannot pretend your wife would prevent your reading Latin and Greek, or even Sanscrit. I am sure she would much sooner you read them than--well, than do other things you do do." "I don't say she would prevent me," returns the lord of Surrenden, with some crossness, "but it's the kind of life one gets into that kills all that sort of thing in one. There is no time for it." "I keep out of the life: why don't you?" "There's no time for anything," says Usk, gloomily. "There's such heaps of things to see to, and such numbers of places to go to, and then one lives _au jour le jour_, and one gets into the swim and goes on, and then there's the shooting, and when there isn't the shooting there's the season, and the racing." "I lead my own life," Brandolin remarks. "Yes; but you don't mind being called eccentric." "No; I don't mind it in the least. If they say nothing worse of me I am grateful."