success in life had been owing to his self-possession, which never verged on hardness or fused itself with its near relation, stolidity.  No man, in fact, was less likely to be upset by the creatures of his mind than he.  Yet when Wade had gently closed the drawing-room door and retreated into his private region, the doctor allowed himself to become the possession of an influence which, to the end of his life, he believed to proceed from the empty room in which he sat, not from his mind who sat there.  The electric light shone softly beneath the shades that shrouded it, and revealed delicately but clearly every smallest detail of the crowded chamber.

The hour was quiet.  No fire danced in the grate.  Doctor Levillier leaned back in his low chair with the intention of composedly awaiting Valentine’s return.  But the composure which had already been slightly shaken by the visit of the lady of the feathers, and by the words of Wade, was destined to be curiously upset by the motionless vision of the empty room.

Sitting thus in it alone the doctor examined it with more detail, and with a more definite remembrance of Valentine’s habit of mind than before.  And he found himself increasingly amazed and confounded.  For not only was the change great, but it was not governed and directed by good taste, or even by any definite taste, either good or bad.  A number of people might have devised the arrangement and selection of the mass of furniture and ornaments, and have thrown things down here and there in sheer defiance of each other’s predilections.  Only in the setting, the red setting of the picture, was there evidence of the presence of a presiding genius.  In that red setting the doctor supposed that he was to read Valentine.  He could read nobody in the rest of the room, or perhaps everybody whose taste refused purity and calm as foolish Dead Sea growths.  Some of the silver ornaments might have assembled in the garish boudoir of a Parisian fille de joie, as the carved woman might have been the couch to which Thais tempted Paphnuce, and the Indian boys the lifeless slaves of Aphrodite.  The jockeys on the wall would have been at home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the jeunesse dorée of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the “Queen of Diamonds.”  The golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked large lips for hours.  The room was in fact one quarrel between the masculine and feminine, the corrupt “modern” and the flagrant Philistine, the vaguely suggestive