Re: Upstairs halls (for now...)
"Dull," Sherlock Holmes muttered to himself aloud.
He said it to the wallpaper, addressing the shape, paper and glue with his customary disdain. He had no drink in his hand and no apparent purpose at a festive party for the garish and the idly curious; from his sensible scuffed bachelor toes to his unremarkable hairline, Sherlock Holmes could be called neither. Long fingers intertwined at the small of his back, elongated spine stretched forth in an angle of inspection, he sent his eyes back in the direction he had come, over a bannister and down a hall. In his pocket was a strangely addressed envelope, strange because it displayed his own name quite prominently, and no one in London was supposed to be aware that Sherlock Holmes was anything but a mouldering corpse dashed on the rocks at the foot of a long waterfall in Switzerland.
He had come, then, to confront his host, strangely equipped with his direction that she was. (She, of course, from the direction of the letters indicating certain dimensions of the hand, and the spacing of the words and punctuation indicated she was a in all likelihood a gently-bred lady of British birth. He was so far disappointed in his search for confrontation, however, a lean and sun-baked hawk squinting over his prominent beak at the ants circling in their mundanities on the ground below. He had no interest whatsoever in the theatricals, found the people predictable and boring, and even the house seemed to hold few secrets that he could not rapidly plumb and dismiss.
He straightened when another man entered the room he had chosen for his swiftly-concluding investigation, blinking twice and glancing down at the man's shoes, then back to his sleeves, and then finally at his face. His expression didn't change: boredom and fatigue.
"You are looking for entertainment, I think, better than what you find on the East End," he commented.