The interior that contained him was no less deceptive.  Its book-lined walls advertised him as the scholarly recluse that he was not.  He had had an eye to this effect.  He had placed in prominent positions the books that he had inherited from his father, who had been a schoolmaster.  You were caught at the very door by the thick red line of The Tudor Classics; by the eleven volumes of The Bekker’s Plato, with Notes, bound in Russia leather, side by side with Jowett’s Translations in cloth; by Sophocles and Dean Plumptre, the Odyssey and Butcher and Lang; by AEschylus and Robert Browning.  The Vicar had carried the illusion of scholarship so far as to hide his Aristophanes behind a little curtain, as if it contained for him an iniquitous temptation.  Of his own accord and with a deliberate intention to deceive, he had added the Early Fathers, Tillotsen’s Sermons and Farrar’s Life of Christ.

On another shelf, rather less conspicuous, were some bound volumes of The Record, with the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Marie Corelli.  On the ledge of his bureau Blackwood’s Magazine, uncut, lay ready to his hand.  The Spectator, in process of skimming, was on his knees.  The Standard, fairly gutted, was on the floor.  There was no room for it anywhere else.

For the Vicar’s study was much too small for him.  Sitting there, in an arm-chair and with his legs in the fender, he looked as if he had taken flight before the awful invasion of his furniture.  His bookcases hemmed him in on three sides.  His roll-top desk, advancing on him from the window, had driven and squeezed him into the arm-chair.  His bureau, armed to the teeth, leaning from its ambush in the recess of the fireplace, threatened both the retreat and the left flank movement of the chair.  The Vicar was neither tall nor powerful, but his study made him look like a giant imprisoned in a cell.

The room was full of the smell of tobacco, of a smoldering coal fire, of old warm leather and damp walls, and of the heavy, virile odor of the Vicar.

A brown felt carpet and thick serge curtains shut out the draft of the northeast window.

On a September evening the Vicar was snug enough in his cell; and before the Grande Polonaise had burst in upon him he had been at peace with God and man.

* * * * *

But when he heard those first exultant, challenging bars he scowled inimically.

Not that he acknowledged them as a challenge.  He was inclined rather to the manly course of ignoring the Grande Polonaise altogether.  And not for a moment would he have admitted that there had been anything in his behavior that could be challenged or defied, least of all by his daughter Alice.  To himself in his study Mr. Cartaret appeared as the image of righteousness established in an impregnable place.  Whereas his daughter Alice was not at all in a position to challenge and defy.