Julia Cavendish was always at home on Saturday afternoons. You used to meet nearly all social sorts and conditions of men and women in that exquisitely tended Bruton Street house: literary folk, financial folk, embassy folk, Anglican priests, politicians, schoolmasters with their wives, young soldiers with their fiancées, old soldiers with their grievances, the "Ritz crowd" (which thinks itself Society), and real Society (which does not need to think about itself at all), intellectual aristocrats and democratic intellectuals--the whole curious "London" which an eclectic woman of means can, if she be so minded, gather about herself by the time she reaches sixty. But the house itself betrayed, to a trained observer, the fact that Ronnie's mother really preferred things to people. Not necessarily expensive things--only occasionally could she afford a real "piece": but pleasant things; beautiful things that became, as it were, part of one's life; things one could feel about the house as though they were people, but people without too many claims on one. Despite which, No. 67a was neither over-large nor over-crowded with possessions. Old prints had space on its panels, old furniture on its floors. Jade idols, Toby mugs, Dresden, Chelsea, and Japanese figures did not jostle one another on its mantelpieces or in its cabinets. Spanish velvets and Venetian brocades forbore to pose as "specimens," but were curtains, cushions, or chair-covers as use demanded. Georgian silver employed itself in a hospitable capacity; Satsuma vases held flowers; Bokhara rugs covered the parquet, not the walls. "I'm a practical old woman," said Julia; and she looked it now, as she lay reading on the sofa in the square bow-windowed drawing-room. A rather stern face was Julia Cavendish's: the Wixton chin dimpled but very determined; the eyes, under their tortoise-shell spectacles, bluer, harder than the eyes of her son. The wrinkles in the scarcely powdered cheeks and at the high temples, as well as the graying of the light brown hair, not all her own, betrayed her age. But the hands which held the novel still appeared the hands of a young woman; nor had the years robbed her of her figure. Her dress--a black tea-gown, real lace at bosom and wrist--was so unfashionable as to be almost smart. Black silk stockings and black satin shoes--she had elegant feet--complete the picture. A bell rang below. Julia laid her novel on a little lacquered stand by the sofa; took off her spectacles; and sat up to the maid's announcement of "Mr. Fancourt." Dot Fancourt, a sentimental, unhappy old man with over-red cheeks, sunken eyes and beetling gray brows, his weak mouth hidden by a walrus mustache, extended both dry hands in effusive salutation. "My dear, how are you?" "In the best of health, as usual." Julia Cavendish released her fingers from the dry hands. "Tell me what Fleet Street thinks about the Ellerson case."