The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald A. Knox

The Gudgeon Inn is the sort of institution that only exists for the sake of people who see life in inverted commas. Externally it is just like a thousand other inns; the creaking signboard, the modest lintel-announcement of the licence, the perspective of doors and passages that greets you as you enter, show no promise of disillusionment. But once you are really inside, you know the difference. The dining-room has no muslin curtains, there is no bamboo firescreen; the tables are not covered with ashtrays and saltcellars advertising beer and mineral waters; there is no vast, unwieldy sideboard heaped with unnecessary coffeepots. The tables are of fumed oak, and the flower-vases on them are of modern crockery in a daring orange; the sideboard is real Elizabethan, and serves no purpose whatever, any more than the three large pewter plates which rest upon it, obviously straight from an old curiosity shop. There are no stuffed animals in glass cases, no sentimental pictures with explicit legends in the manner of the later nineteenth century; no strange seashells on the mantelpieces, no horsehair sofas, no superannuated musical-boxes. The walls are very bare and beautifully whitewashed; a few warming-pans and some mezzotints are all their ornament; there are open fireplaces with brightly polished dogs, tiled floors, rush mats, wooden coal-scuttles with archaic mottoes carved on them. In a word, the inn has been recently "done up."

"It isn't an inn," Bredon was complaining to his wife over their evening meal; "it's an old-world hostelry, and it irritates me. I believe they expected us to dress for dinner; there isn't any commercial room, only a place they call the Ingle Nook; I can't find a dartboard anywhere, or an antimacassar. Their idea of a beer-mug is a thing you stick up on a shelf and look at."