It was the room so familiar to his childhood and youth, with the
family pictures, the Gainsborough full-length of his very plain
great-grandmother in white satin at the end, two or three Vandyck
school-portraits of seventeenth-century Mannerings, and the
beautiful Hogarth head--their best possession--that was so like
Pamela. The furniture of the room was of many different
dates--incongruous, shabby, and on the whole ugly. The Mannerings of
the past had not been an artistic lot.
Nor had the room--the house indeed--many tender associations for
him. His childhood had not been very happy. He had never got on with
his father, and his mother, who had been the victim of various long
illnesses during his boyhood, had never, unluckily, meant much to
him. He knew that he was of a very old stock, which had played a
long and considerable part in the world; but the fact brought him no
thrill. 'That kind of thing is played out,' he thought. Let his
father disinherit him--he was quite indifferent.
Then, as he fell silent beside his father's new secretary, the table
vanished.
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