"You can have all the primitivism you want if you look out of the
windows," Cecil remarked drily. "You will see nothing but a line of
stunted trees, and behind, miles of marshes and the greyest sea
which ever played upon the land. Listen! You don't hear a sound like
that in the cities."

Even as he spoke they heard the dull roar of the north wind booming
across the wild empty places which lay between the Red Hall and the
sea. A storm of raindrops was flung against the window. The Princess
shivered.

"It is an idyll, the last word in the refining of sensations," Major
Forrest declared. "You give us sybaritic luxury, and in order that
we shall realize it, you provide the background of savagery. In the
Carlton one might dine like this and accept it as a matter of
course. Appreciation is forced upon us by these suggestions of the
wilderness without."

"Not all without, either," Cecil de la Borne remarked, raising his
eyeglass and pointing to the walls. "See where my ancestors frown
down upon us--you can only just distinguish their bare shapes. No De
la Borne has had money enough to have them renovated or even
preserved. They have eaten their way into the canvases, and the
canvases into the very walls. You see the empty spaces, too. A
Reynolds and a Gainsboro' have been cut out from there and sold. I
can show you long empty galleries, pictureless, and without a scrap
of furniture. We have ghosts like rats, rooms where the curtains and
tapestries are falling to pieces from sheer decay. Oh! I can assure
you that our primitivism is not wholly external."