In all the house his favourite room was the high, thin
drawing-room with an old gold mirror at one end of it and a piano
muffled in brown holland. The mirror caught the piano with its peaked
inquiring shape, that, in its inflection, looked so much more tremendous
and ominous than it did in plain reality. Through the mirror the piano
looked as though it might do anything, and to Henry, who knew nothing
about pianos, it was responsible for almost everything that occurred in
the house.
The windows of the room gave a fine display of the gardens, the
children, the carriages, and the distant houses, but it was when the
Square was empty that Henry liked best to gaze down into it, because
then the empty house and the empty square prepared themselves together
for some tremendous occurrence. Whenever such an interval of silence
struck across the noise and traffic of the day, it seemed that all the
world screwed itself up for the next event. "One--two--three." But the
crisis never came. The noise returned again, people laughed and shouted,
bells rang and motors screamed. Nevertheless, one day something would
surely happen.
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