In Paris there was a dispute with an extortionate cabman, and the
crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven was rough and bitterly cold. They were
both ill. They reached home very dirty and weary, and among the pile of
letters and papers on Trafford's desk was a big bundle of Science Note
proofs, and two letters from Croydon and Pinner to alter the hours of
his lectures for various plausible and irritating reasons.
The little passage looked very small and rather bare as the door shut
behind them, and the worn places that had begun to be conspicuous during
the last six months, and which they had forgotten during the Swiss
holiday, reasserted themselves. The dining-room, after spacious rooms
flooded with sunshine, betrayed how dark it was, and how small. Those
Bokhara embroideries that had once shone so splendid, now, after Mrs.
Lee's rich and unlimited harmonies, seemed skimpy and insufficient, mere
loin-cloths for the artistic nakedness of the home. They felt, too, they
were beginning to find out their post-impressionist picture. They had
not remembered it as nearly so crude as it now appeared. The hole a
flying coal had burnt in the unevenly faded dark-blue carpet looked
larger than it had ever done before, and was indeed the only thing that
didn't appear faded and shrunken.