Chapter 19
THE SNARLThe large room immediately on the left of the front door at Portminster Lodge had been designed in those days when thought, time, and, above all, space were devoted to fine eating. Much of the south wall was taken up by a bay window, narrow and tall as the end of a tram, while directly opposite were a pair of folding doors opening into a slightly smaller apartment which also possessed a window of the same kind in the back wall of the house.
Lawrence Palinode’s father, whose somewhat hand-painted portrait hung over the fireplace, had entertained the wit and scholarship of Victorian Europe in this small banqueting hall, but now his son worked at one end of it and slept at the other, only a little incommoded by the fact that most of the original furniture remained exact
