The maid went for the child, and Lady Tranmore entered the drawing-room.
The Ashes had been settled since their marriage in a house in Hill
Street--a house to which Kitty had lost her heart at first sight. It was
old and distinguished, covered here and there with eighteenth-century
decoration, once, no doubt, a little florid and coarse beside the finer
work of the period, but now agreeably blunted and mellowed by time.
Kitty had had her impetuous and decided way with the furnishing of it;
and, though Lady Tranmore professed to admire it, the result was, in
truth, too French and too pagan for her taste. Her own room reflected
the rising worship of Morris and Burse-Jones, of which, indeed, she had
been an adept from the beginning. Her walls were covered by the
well-known pomegranate or jasmine or sunflower patterns; her hangings
were of a mystic greenish-blue; her pictures were drawn either from the
Italian primitives or their modern followers. Celtic romance, Christian
symbolism, all that was touching, other-worldly, and obscure--our late
English form, in fact, of the great Romantic reaction--it was amid
influences of this kind that Lady Tranmore lived and fed her own
imagination.
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