"Yes, there's nothing to keep us here," she said, "now." CHAPTER V I One Hundred and Twenty-nine Curzon Street was the dowry that the third Marquess of Longlan provided for his daughter, Lady Caroline Lacey, on her marriage in 1818 with Viscount Clare, the only son of the second Earl of Clarehaven. It was a double-fronted Georgian house with a delicate fanlight over the door, from which a fan-shaped flight of steps guarded by a pair of tall iron flambeau-stands led down to the pavement. That famous old beau, the first marquess, had given an eye to the architecture, and, being himself a man of fine proportions, had seen to it that the rooms of his new house would set off his figure to advantage. Solid without being stolid, dignified but never pompous, graceful but nowhere flimsy, and for everybody except the servants, who lived like corpses in a crypt, convenient--the town residence of Lord Clarehaven was as desirable as those desirable young men of Assyria upon whom in their blue clothes Aholah doted not less promiscuously than house-agents have doted upon a good biblical word. When the second earl took charge of his wife's dowry, the fashions of the Regency were in the meridian, and the house was decorated and furnished to suit the prevailing mode. Apart from the verse of the period, there have been few manifestations of art and craft more detestable either for beauty or for comfort than those of the Regency. Great bellying lumps of furniture as fat and foul as the First Gentleman himself, and with as much superfluity of ornament as the First Gentleman's own clothes, were introduced into 129 Curzon Street to spoil the fine severity of the Georgian structure. Ugly furniture was added by the third earl, whose taste--he was a vice-chamberlain of the royal household in the 'fifties--was affected by his position as a mind is affected by misfortune. The dowager during the esthetic ardors that glowed upon the first years of her married life hung a few green and yellow draperies in the drawing-room, and during the early 'nineties she stocked these with woolen spiders or with butterflies of silk and velvet; in fact, when the fifth earl took over the control of his town house it was filled from the cellars to the attics with the accumulated abominations of eighty-five barbarous years. No doubt he would never have noticed the ugliness of the furniture if the discomfort of it had not been so obtrusive; but when he was planning to live merrily with his bride in Curzon Street he invited Messrs. Waring & Gillow to bring the house up to date with its own period and the present, allowing them a free hand with everything except the chairs, beds, and sofas, of which it was stipulated that none was to rate form or style above comfort. On the whole the result was an improvement; and since there are always enough relays of new competitors in the race for originality, purchasers were soon found even for those triads of chairs that are still seen in