From these two sources there proceeded an exultation which was not ignoble, and which went forward with a conquering movement, lifting his heart as he entered the great doors. Within those doors some indefinable cold breath did strike him. Even in that present mood of his, he could not shake off an impression of strangeness. The furniture was not what he knew; it was recent; it belonged to a more glorious but certainly a less commodious age. It was bent into the strangest patterns; fantastic curves met here and there in the faces of young unhappy women. There was applied to it by screws moulding which would have required the utmost art of the sculptor had it not consisted of composition. The club quartered the three leopards of Anjou, gules regardant on a field argent with the Lys semé argent upon a field azure: in chief a crown royal and supporters, dexter, a lion rampant languetirant, sinister an unicorn, enchainé: gartiered the device, “Honi soit qui mal ‘pense,’” and the legend “Dieu et mon Droit” real. This coat was blazoned above the mantelpiece, on the backs of the sofas, the buttons of the servants’ livery, the notepaper and the china; it was woven into the tapestry; it covered the seats of the chairs; nowhere was the proud title of that house left unsymbolised. In the general decoration of the hall and of the rooms, enormous masses of perfectly new gilding lit up the interior with a grandeur that recalled Empire indeed, but suggested also the strain inseparable from great possessions; and, in between the gilding, panels of a dead foreign white forbade Mr Burden such repose as he imagined should pervade a London room. There were, it is true, upon the walls, reproductions of eighteenth century engravings, very charmingly framed in the American manner. The good taste of their arrangement was marked: they were few and widely spread; but of this Mr Burden knew nothing; his age had narrowed him, and he did not comprehend our day. He stood in the midst of the hall, as might some sea-faring man who had sailed and found a people most unlike his own. He stood and waited. Then the stronger mood returned to him, and he forgot these things; for Lord Benthorpe, Mr Barnett and Mr Harbury had come into the room together. He went forward to meet them. When they had shaken hands, Mr Barnett, absent-minded as are many men of his calibre, went before them with unconscious mastery, and led them into a little room apart, where they could talk undisturbed; and this had been reserved for him, for in that club Mr Barnett held already the position which in a few years he was to hold in the commonwealth itself. Here, in this small room, were the same good taste, the same grandeur of decoration; but, for Mr Burden, now recovered, no longer the same feeling of ill-ease.