It was not at all the weather for the country. And besides, Anna still had some shopping to do for her tropical outfit. Matthew had made all the arrangements in his rather fussy, rather officious way for them to stay at a queer little hotel in Jermyn Street that he knew. Outside, it looked undistinguished, and even somewhat shady, with its dingy paint, and its closely covered windows that were like so many eyes closing in a sly and possibly disreputable wink. But once inside, treading the thick, hot, patterned carpets, surrounded by the ugly, monumental furniture, immensely solid mahogany islands set in immense oceans of florid woolliness, you knew instinctively that you were in the very stronghold of respectability. The place was a pure survival from the past, leading straight back to the pride of the Victorian era with its vast solidity, and its stuffiness, and its cumbersome gilt mirrors, and its strangely hot-seeming, heavy, plushy, everlasting materials. Reminiscent of old volumes of Punch.
