The room was comfortable, and luxuriously furnished, but with the ugly taste of the Early Victorian epoch. Lady Canvey, now over eighty, clung to the decorations and colours which had been fashionable when she was young, and on stepping into the room Lady Jim felt as though she had slipped back to the time of the Great Exhibition. The motor-car outside, and the old lady in the red velvet armchair, represented widely-severed eras. And even Joan the saint and Lionel the curate seemed alien to the world Lady Jim inhabited. For that world closely resembled the one Noah had fled from into the ark, when the denizens "were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage"--though, to be sure, marriage nowadays, save as a visible sign of respectability, was not much considered. "Well, godmother," said Lady Jim, thinking to curry favour with this she-Cr[oe]sus by using an approved, if somewhat obsolete, address, "you are looking well." "Then I'm a living lie," retorted Lady Canvey, grimly. "How can you expect me to look well, when Lionel here has been quoting texts for want of originality?" "I wanted you to hear the scripture," protested Lionel. "That's _your_ business," replied Lady Canvey, stirring her tea; "but I can hear the scriptures read when I please by Joan, who has a much sweeter voice than you, young man, as I suppose you think"; and she gave one of her dry chuckles. The curate reddened, and Joan looked confused. Lady Jim, glancing from one serious face to the other, drew her own conclusions, and murmured something about a "sealed fountain." Lady Canvey, not being versed in biblical imagery, did not understand, but Lionel comprehended on the instant. "I am glad to hear that you read your Bible, Lady James," he said quickly. Leah hated to be addressed in this stiff manner; yet it seemed appropriate to the out-of-date room. But she had no desire to quarrel with her godmother's pet in the presence of that opulent lady, so she turned the tables on Lionel by looking shocked. "Of course I do. I am not a pagan." "Then I must be one," snapped Lady Canvey; "for I wouldn't be you, Leah Kaimes, for the heaven I don't expect to go to." "Hush! hush!" said Lionel, pained by this flippancy coming from those withered lips. Lady Jim glanced at her opulent beauty in a dim mirror, framed in tarnished gold, and laughed softly. Her godmother saw the look and was swift to interpret its meaning. "I was like that once," she said, in rather a quavering voice, "and you'll come to be such as I am, only you'll never wear so well. Oh, what an arm I had!" and she began to weep silently over her lost beauty.