Here the square of carpet was brown as fallen pine-needles in October, the walls were a soft tan, the ceiling and woodwork ivory-toned.  One saw between the windows a bookcase filled with handsomely bound books, and on top of it a few pieces of such old china as would enrapture my mother.  The white marble mantel held one or two signed photographs in silver frames, a pair of old candlesticks of quaint and pleasing design, and a dull red pottery vase full of Japanese quince.  There were a few good pictures on the walls—­a gay impudent Detaille Lancer whose hardy face of a fighting Frenchman warmed one’s heart; some sketches signed with notable American names; and above the mantel a female form clothed only in the ambient air, her long hair swept back from her shoulders, and a pearl-colored dove alighting upon her outstretched finger.

I suppose one might call the whole room beautiful, for even the desk was of that perfection of simplicity whose cost is as rubies.  It was not, however, a womanish room; there was no slightest hint of femininity in its uncluttered, sane, forceful orderliness.  It was rather like Hunter himself—­polished, perfect, with a note of finality and of fitness upon it like a hall-mark.  Nothing out of keeping, nothing overdone.  Even the red petal fallen from the pottery vase on the white marble mantel was a last note of perfection.

Flint glanced about him with the falcon-glance that nothing escapes.  For a moment the light stayed upon the nude figure over the mantel—­the one real nude in all Appleboro, which cherishes family portraits of rakehelly old colonials in wigs, chokers, and tight-fitting smalls, and lolloping ladies with very low necks and sixteen petticoats, but where scandalized church-goers have been known to truss up a little plaster copy of the inane Greek Slave in a pocket-handkerchief, by way of needful drapery.

“What I want to know is, why a lady should have to strip to the buff just to play with a pigeon?” breathed John Flint, and his tone was captious.

It did not strike me as being to the last degree whimsical, improbable, altogether absurd, that such a man should pause at such a time to comment upon art as he thinks it isn’t.  On the contrary it was a consistent and coherent feature of that astounding nightmare in which we figured.  The absurd and the impossible always happen in dreams.  I am sure that if the dove on the woman’s finger had opened its painted bill and spoken, say about the binomial theorem, or the Effect of Too Much Culture upon Women’s Clubs, I should have listened with equal gravity and the same abysmal absence of surprise.  I pattered platitudinously: 

“The greatest of the Greeks considered the body divine in itself, my son, and so their noblest art was nude.  Some moderns have thought there is no real art that is not nude.  Truth itself is naked.”

“Aha!” said my son, darkly.  “I see!  You take off your pants when you go out to feed your chickens, say, and you’re not bughouse.  You’re art.  Well, if Truth is naked, thank God the rest of us are liars!”