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By Root 5679 0

houses, of great height, of a style at once portentous and brittle, knocked into one—or, rather, not knocked, the structure might hardly stand it, but connected by arches at key points. Of the two giant front doors under the portico, one has been glazed and sealed up; the other, up to midnight, yields to pressure on a round brass knob. The hotel's name, in tarnished gilt capitals, is wired out from the top of the portico. One former diningroom has been •exposed to the hall and provides the hotel lounge; the other is still the diningroom, it is large enough. One of the first floor drawingrooms is a drawingroom still. The public rooms are lofty and large in a diluted way: inside them there is extensive vacuity, nothing so nobly positive as space. The fireplaces with their flights of brackets, the doors with their poor mouldings, the nude-looking windows exist in deserts of wall: after dark the high-up electric lights die high in the air above unsmiling armchairs. If these houses give little by becoming hotels, they lose little; even when they were homes, no intimate life can have flowered inside these walls or become endeared to them. They were the homes of a class doomed from the start, without natural privilege, without grace. Their builders must have built to enclose fog, which having seeped in never quite goes away. Dyspepsia, uneasy wishes, ostentation and chilblains can, only, have governed the lives of families here.

In the Karachi Hotel, all upstairs rooms except the drawingroom have been partitioned up to make two or three more: the place is a warren. The thinness of these bedroom partitions makes love or talk indiscreet. The floors creak, the beds creak; drawers only pull out of chests with violent convulsions; mirrors swing round and hit you one in the eye. Most privacy, though least air, is to be had in the attics, which were too small to be divided up. One of these attics Major Brutt occupied.

At the end of Monday (for this was the end of the day unless you were gay or busy) dinner was being served. The guests could now dine in daylight—or rather, by its unearthly reflections on the facades of houses across the road. In the diningroom, each table had been embellished, some days ago, with three sprays of mauve sweet peas. Quite a number of tables, tonight, were empty, and the few couples and trios dotted about did not say much—weighed down, perhaps, by the height of the echoing gloom, or by the sense of eating in an exposed place. Only Major Brutt's silence seemed not uneasy, for he, as usual, dined alone. The one or two families he had found congenial had, as usual, just gone: these tonight were nearly all newcomers. Once or twice he glanced at some other table, wondering whom he might get to know next. He was learning, in his humble way, to be conscious of his faint interestingness as a solitary man. On the whole, however, he looked at his plate, or at the air just above it; he tried hard not to let recollections of lunch at Anna's make him discontented with dinner here—for, really, they did one wonderfully well. He had just finished his plate of rhubarb and custard when the head waitress came and mumbled over his ear.

He said: "But I don't understand—'Young lady'?"

"Asking for you, sir. She is in the lounge."

"But I am not expecting a young lady."

"In the lounge, sir. She said she would wait."

"Then you mean she's there now?"

The waitress gave him a nod and a sort of slighting look. Her good opinion of him was being undone in a moment: she thought him at once ungallant and sly. Major Brutt, unaware, sat and turned the position over—this might be a joke, but who would play a joke on him? He was not sprightly enough to have sprightly friends. Shyness or obstinacy made him pour himself out another glass of water and drink it before he left the table—rhubarb leaves an acid taste in the teeth. He wiped his mouth, folded his table napkin and left the diningroom with a heavy, cautious tread—conscious of people pausing in what they were hardly saying, of diners' glum eyes following him.

One's view into the