"No, I confess I have never trod them before," he said, becoming all at once respectful to me. I expect he lives in a garret, and has no carpet at all, and I thought I would be good to him, and help him to bump out his article, and not cram him, but tell him where things really came from. So I drew his attention particularly to the aluminium eagle, and the pinchbeck serpent George picked up in Wardour Street. I left out George's famous yarn about the sack of our ancestral Palace in Turin in the fifteenth century, when the Veros were finally disseminated or dissipated, whichever it is. I don't believe it myself, but George always accounts for his swarthy complexion by his Italian grandmother. Aunt Gerty says it is all his grandmother, or in other words, all liver! We went down-stairs into the study, which is the largest room in the house. "Your father has realized the wish of the Psalmist," said _The Bittern_ man. "_Set my feet in a large room!_" "He likes to have room to spread himself," I said, "and to swing cats--books in, I mean." "So your father uses missiles in the fury of composition?" "Sometimes; but oftenest he swears, and that saves the books. He mostly swears. Look here!" I had just found a piece of paper in Miss Mander's handwriting, and on it was written, "Selections from the nervous vocabulary of Mr. Vero-Taylor during the last hour." _The Bittern_ man looked at them, and, "By Jove! these are corkers!" he said. Then I thought perhaps I ought not to have let him see them. There was Drayton, the ironmonger's bill lying about too, and I saw him raise his eyebrows at the last item, "_To one chased brass handle for coal-cellar door_." "That's what I call being thorough!" said _The Bittern_ man. "I'm thorough myself. See this interview when it is done!" He was thorough. He looked at everything, and particularly asked to see the pen George uses. "Or perhaps he uses a stylograph?" he asked. "Mercy, no!" I screamed out. "He would have an indigestion! This is his pen--at least, it is this week's pen. George is wasteful of pens; he eats one a week." "Very interesting!" said he. "Most authors have a fetish, but I never heard of their eating their fetish before. This will make a nice fat paragraph. Come on!" You see what friends we had become! We went into the dining-room, and I showed him the dresser, with all the blue china on, and the Turkey carpet spread on it, instead of a white one--that was how they had it in the Middle Ages. He sympathized with me about how uncomfortable Mediæval was, and if it wasn't for the honour and glory of it, how much we preferred Early Victoria, when the drawers draw, and the mirrors reflect--there's not one looking-glass in the house that poor Ariadne can see herself in when she's dressing to go out to a party--or chairs that will bear sitting on. Why, there are four in one room that we are forbidden to sit upon on pain of sudden death!