She might know Greek; at heart, he believed, she was a good housewife; and when she incidentally mentioned Dutch relations, he seemed to see her with a background of bright pots and pans, mopping tiled floors.
But presently he ceased to pay much attention to her.

His dreamy sense became aware of the scene as a whole; the long table; his father's fantastic figure at the head of it; Alice Gaddesden elaborately dressed and much made up on the one side, his sister Margaret in a high black gown, erect and honest, on the other; Desmond and Pamela together, chatting and chaffing with the Rector.
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.