But in a sense Bladesover has never left me;
it is, as I said at the outset, one of those dominant explanatory
impressions that make the framework of my mind. Bladesover illuminates
England; it has become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and
truly conservative in English life. It is my social datum. That is why I
have drawn it here on so large a scale.
When I came back at last to the real Bladesover on an inconsequent
visit, everything was far smaller than I could have supposed possible.
It was as though everything had shivered and shrivelled a little at the
Lichtenstein touch. The harp was still in the saloon, but there was a
different grand piano with a painted lid and a metrostyle pianola, and
an extraordinary quantity of artistic litter and bric-a-brac scattered
about. There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over it all. The
furniture was still under chintz, but it wasn't the same sort of chintz
although it pretended to be, and the lustre-dangling chandeliers had
passed away. Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced the brown volumes I
had browsed among--they were mostly presentation copies of contemporary
novels and the National Review and the Empire Review, and the Nineteenth
Century and after jostled current books on the tables--English new books
in gaudy catchpenny "artistic" covers, French and Italian novels in
yellow, German art handbooks of almost incredible ugliness.
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