The Hotel de la Garonne was in a small unrenovated street in which the cobble-stones of old Paris still flourished, lying between the Avenue de l'Opera and the Place de la Bourse. Sherringham had occasionally traversed the high dimness, but had never noticed the tall, stale _maison meublee_, the aspect of which, that of a third-rate provincial inn, was an illustration of Mrs. Rooth's shrunken standard. "We would ask you to come up, but it's quite at the top and we haven't a sitting-room," the poor lady bravely explained. "We had to receive Mr. Nash at a cafe." Nick Dormer declared that he liked cafes, and Miriam, looking at his cousin, dropped with a flash of passion the demand: "Do you wonder I should want to do something--so that we can stop living like pigs?" Peter recognised the next day that though it might be boring to listen to her it was better to make her recite than to let her do nothing, so effectually did the presence of his sister and that of Lady Agnes, and even of Grace and Biddy, appear, by a strange tacit opposition, to deprive hers, ornamental as it was, of a reason. He had only to see them all together to perceive that she couldn't pass for having come to "meet" them--even her mother's insinuating gentility failed to put the occasion on that footing--and that she must therefore be assumed to have been brought to show them something. She was not subdued, not colourless enough to sit there for nothing, or even for conversation--the sort of conversation that was likely to come off--so that it was inevitable to treat her position as connected with the principal place on the carpet, with silence and attention and the pulling together of chairs. Even when so established it struck him at first as precarious, in the light, or the darkness, of the inexpressive faces of the other ladies, seated in couples and rows on sofas--there were several in addition to Julia and the Dormers; mainly the wives, with their husbands, of Sherringham's fellow-secretaries--scarcely one of whom he felt he might count upon for a modicum of gush when the girl should have finished.