There too one always met certain more or less educated workmen,
rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn.
I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more
than my share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in
one evening than he had heard in the whole course of his past
life. I had merely preferred Parnell, then at the height of his
career, to Michael Davitt who had wrecked his Irish influence by
international politics. We sat round a long unpolished and
unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung
Rossetti's 'Pomegranate,' a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one
wall and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian
carpet. Morris had said somewhere or other that carpets were meant
for people who took their shoes off when they entered a house, and
were most in place upon a tent floor. I was a little disappointed
in the house, for Morris was an old man content at last to gather
beautiful things rather than to arrange a beautiful house. I saw
the drawing-room once or twice and there alone all my sense of
decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's pictures,
was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from Chaucer
by Burne Jones, but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a
little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps,
and with little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable.
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