My wife said you would prefer a north light. If that
one doesn't suit, you can have your choice of any other."
I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In less
than a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the boredom
of doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house,
which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, the
most perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;
the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Out
of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and
inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching
from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's
hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at
intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of
coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red
and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the
tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak
cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded.
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