When we sat down to tea Alice insisted on sitting beside me. I had an idea, possibly suggested by Miss Izzy’s words, that the room we were in was not often used. I hoped it wasn’t, for it was stuffy and uncomfortable, and so small that you felt everywhere beneath the table the warm proximity of other people’s limbs. I hated being cramped in this way; it seemed to me that all the time I was breathing other people’s breaths, and once I got this notion into my head I couldn’t forget it. The furniture was cheap, flimsy, and uncomfortable. The curtains, the gaudy vases, the hideous wall-paper, were of the brightest and least accordant colours, and I even preferred our parlour at home, where, if the things were not less ugly, there were fewer of them. Several pictures hung on the walls, and one hung directly in front of me. It was an engraving, and represented a young man in armour visibly torn between a desire for virtue, embodied in a flaxen-haired lady in floating white drapery, and a deplorable weakness for all that another lady might be taken as symbolising. This latter person was a brunette, and rather more scantily, though quite decently, draped. She held a glass of champagne in her hand, waving it triumphantly aloft, like a torch. I confess that the work fascinated me, for it was my first acquaintance with the type of art it represented. “A fine picture,” murmured Uncle George, seeing me gazing at it. “It’s a Royal Academy picture that!” I said nothing. I did not know what a Royal Academy picture was, nor did I admire this example. It was not so much that the figures looked like unsuccessful waxworks, as that the banality of the moral irritated me. It was the first time I had ever seen art of this extremely ethical character, and in its spirit it reminded me of my old friends in the “Golden Ladder Series.” I hoped tea would not last much longer. In the small room, the large yellow slices of an extremely odoriferous cheese made the atmosphere heavy and unpleasant. Moreover, when this cheese was offered to me with hard, pink, sugared biscuits, I didn’t quite know what to do. I had refused several things already, and I knew Aunt Margaret thought I was turning up my nose at the food provided for me, and provided specially, I could guess, from the behaviour of the others, because it was my first night. So I accepted the cheese and sugared biscuits, and struggled through them. After tea George asked if we were going to have “worship” now or later? We had it “now,” and as soon as we rose from our knees he suggested that we should “go out for a bit.” “Where are you going to?” Aunt Margaret inquired. “Oh, I don’t know: up the street just. We can’t sit in the house all the evenin’. It’s quite fine now.” I was nothing loath, and clattered down the stairs after him. As soon as we were outside George’s uncertainty as to our destination appeared to vanish. “Did you ever see a boxing match?” he asked. “A boxing match?”