“Yes.”

“It’s so stuffy in this room,” she complained, expelling much breath.

It was stuffy in the room.  The room was too full of the multitudinous belongings and furniture of wife and husband.  It was too small for its uses.  The pair, unduly thrown together, needed two rooms.  But the house could not yield them two rooms, though from the outside it had an air of spaciousness.  The space was employed in complying with custom, in imitating the disposition of larger houses, and in persuading the tenant that he was as good as his betters.  There was a basement, because the house belonged to the basement era, and because it is simpler to burrow than to erect.  On the ground floor were the hall—­narrow, and the dining-room—­narrow.  To have placed the dining-room elsewhere would have been to double the number of stairs between it and the kitchen; moreover, the situation of the dining-room in all such correct houses is immutably fixed by the code Thus the handiest room in the house was occupied during four hours of the twenty-four, and wasted during the remaining twenty.  Behind the dining-room was a very small room appointed by the code to be George’s ‘den.’  It would never have been used at all had not George considered it his duty to use it occasionally, and had not Lois at intervals taken a fancy to it because it was not hers.

The whole of the first floor was occupied by the landing, the well of the staircase, and the drawing-room, which last was inevitably shaped in the resemblance of an L. The small back portion of it over George’s den was never utilized save by the grand piano and rare pianists.  Still, the code demanded that the drawing-room should have this strange appendage, and that a grand piano should reside in it modestly, apologetically, like a shame that cannot be entirely concealed.  Nearly every house in Elm Park Road, and every house in scores of miles of other correct streets in the West End, had a drawing-room shaped in the semblance of an L, and a grand piano in the hinterland thereof.  The drawing-room, like the dining-room, was occupied during about four hours of the twenty-four, and wasted during the remaining twenty.

The two main floors of the house being in such manner accounted for, the family and its dependents principally lived aloft on the second and third floors.  Eight souls slept up there nightly.  A miracle of compression!

George had had the house for ten years; he entered it as a bridegroom.  He had stayed in it for seven years because the landlord would only confide it to him on lease, and at the end of the seven years he lacked the initiative to leave it.  An ugly house, utterly without architectural merit!  A strange house for an architect to inhabit!  George, however, had never liked it.  Before his marriage he had discovered a magnificent house in Fitzroy Square, a domestic masterpiece of the Adams period, exquisitely designed without and within, huge rooms and many rooms,