The drawing-room at the Meadows was the sunniest, most cheerful room in a house the great distinction of which was resolute, sometimes slightly overpowering, social sunshine and cheerfulness. Mrs. Hilliard used to call it an ‘Omnium Gatherum,’ a flagrant instance of eclecticism where rooms were concerned. Its furniture, and the occupations she engaged in there, did not date beyond her own reign at the Meadows, and so would have been pronounced worthless by connoisseurs. But, as Mrs. Hilliard maintained, she had lived long enough to have seen several styles of decoration and ladies’ work, and her drawing-room proved with what catholicity of spirit she had ‘gone in’ for each in succession. The only drawback was that she could not make up her mind to be entirely off with the old love in order to be on with the new. Thus she sacrificed the great aim of the last exposition of high art—unity, to her unprincipled softness of heart and lack of sternness of purpose. She retained the cold whiteness and pompous glitter of the upper part of her walls, and the undue warmth of colouring and floweriness of her carpets—attempting to combine them with dirty orange dados and sage-green _portières_, just as she kept the faded gorgeousness of her Berlin woolwork in stripes of bold embroidery divided by bands of imperial purple and emerald-green velvet, or in great groups of Queen of Sheba flowers like the exuberant flower-pieces of Flemish painters, introduced into close contact with the dim, delicate conventionalities and studiously faint, long-drawn-out effects of nineteenth-century, art needlework. It was a highly objectionable compromise from an artistic point of view, but somehow it was not only saved from absolute frightfulness, to a Philistine it had a charm of its own, because of its little bit of mellowed, blended life—such as one may occasionally meet with, on a grand scale, in a pile of building which began by being a feudal castle, and went on to be an old English manor-house, then progressed into a Georgian mansion, ending by proving the many-sided home of a race. So time with lingering fingers had toned down and tempered the robust gaudiness of the abused Berlin woolwork till it too had acquired something of the exquisitely soft harmonies of ancient tapestry. That was Catherine Hilliard’s opinion, and she had a fine eye for colour. The chairs and tables, the books, the pictures and the china in the room, were all about as incongruous, and yet all in a manner represented some phase and echo of human life, and had come to fit into each other.