He noticed how very frail she was, almost like a saint who had fasted. Her white hair, loosely fastened, seemed as a halo while she stood there in the dim hall with the sunlight behind rimming her head with light. Her hand was so thin that John could feel all the bones in it and her flesh was almost transparent. Meanwhile Marsh had superintended their boxes. "Come up to our room, Scissors!" he cried, and John followed him up an old oak staircase, along a narrow corridor that ran the whole length of the house, overlooking the courtyard on one side. Their room was at the end, and the beauty of it made John's heart leap up. It had two low casement windows, bordered with creeper drooping to the lawns below. Their two beds faced the windows; the dressing table, mantelpiece and writing desk were decorated with fresh bunches of violets. The perfume pervaded the room and mingled with the delightful smell of clean linen, which John had come to distinguish as a 'country house smell.' "What a jolly room!" cried John. Marsh seemed pleased at his approbation. "Not a bit like a parson's hole, is it?" he commented. "This room is modern--that's a copy of a Cezanne; that's a real Pizarro--you won't find on these walls any woolly legend 'God is Love,' or a dead aunt's knitting in five colours--'Blessed are the meek.' I ejected all those long ago." "But what does your governor say?" "Nothing--he merely smiles. I am the cuckoo's egg in the family nest." John was a little shocked. He felt uneasy when Marsh talked in this strain. It was not that Marsh wanted to shock, but John was in an alien country, which his friend evidently knew well. Every day John was discovering some thing new about himself until his mind was in a condition of fear. Marsh was so splendidly cool about everything. When John asked him questions, he showed no surprise, or superiority, but explained and amplified from familiarity with his theme. Marsh dismissed certain things as "rotten," others he characterised as "smuggy." John always had a feeling that Marsh knew much more than he said. His knowledge of books, for instance, was extraordinary. John was discovering new books every day of his life, but he no sooner announced a fresh treasure than Marsh knew all about it, had read it long ago and could supplement the knowledge with personal information concerning the author and other books he had written. He was at home in French literature or English, which John accounted for later when he found that Mrs. Marsh had spent her youth in a French convent school. This discovery was made at tea-time in the study, a delightfully cosy room full of books and loose papers, and magazines, with big chairs in which you sank low and all the cushions gradually deflated as though the breath had been crushed out of them. Marsh talked to his mother in French, greatly to John's admiration.