“That’s cheap,” said the lady.  “I’ve heard Auguste say cleverer things.”

“Who’s Auguste?” asked Dale.

“Auguste,” said I, “is the generic name of the clown in the French Hippodrome.”

“Oh, the Circus!” cried Dale.

“I’ll be glad if you’ll teach him to call it the Hippodrome, Mr. de Gex,” she remarked, with another of her slumberous glances.

“That will be one step nearer perfection,” said I.

The short November twilight had deepened into darkness; the fire, which was blazing when we entered, had settled into a glow, and the room was lit by one shaded lamp.  To me the dimness was restful, but Dale, who, with the crude instincts of youth, loves glare, began to fidget, and presently asked whether he might turn on the electric light.  Permission was given.  My hostess invited me to smoke and, to hand her a box of cigarettes which lay on the mantelpiece, I rose, bent over her while she lit her cigarette from my match, and resuming an upright position, became rooted to the hearthrug.

With the flood of illumination, disclosing everything that hitherto had been wrapped in shadow and mystery, came a shock.

It was a most extraordinary, perplexing room.  The cheap and the costly, the rare and the common, the exquisite and the tawdry jostled one another on walls and floor.  At one end of the Louis XVI sofa on which Dale had been sitting lay a boating cushion covered with a Union Jack, at the other a cushion covered with old Moorish embroidery.  The chair I had vacated I discovered to be of old Spanish oak and stamped Cordova leather bearing traces of a coat-of-arms in gold.  My hostess lounged in a low characterless seat amid a mass of heterogeneous cushions.  There were many flowers in the room—­some in Cloisonne vases, others in gimcrack vessels such as are bought at country fairs.  On the mantelpiece and on tables were mingled precious ivories from Japan, trumpery chalets from the Tyrol, choice bits of Sevres and Venetian glass, bottles with ladders and little men inside them, vulgar china fowls sitting on eggs, and a thousand restless little objects screeching in dumb agony at one another.

The more one looked the more confounded became confusion.  Lengths of beautifully embroidered Chinese silk formed curtains for the doors and windows; but they were tied back with cords ending in horrible little plush monkeys in lieu of tassels.  A Second Empire gilt mirror hung over the Louis XVI sofa, and was flanked on the one side by a villainous German print of “The Huntsman’s Return” and on the other by a dainty water-colour.  Myriads of photographs, some in frames, met the eye everywhere—­on the grand piano, on the occasional tables, on the mantelpiece, stuck obliquely all round the Queen Anne mirror above it, on the walls.  Many of them represented animals—­bears and lions and pawing horses.  Dale’s photograph I noticed in a silver frame on the piano.  There was not a book in the place.  But in the corner of the room by a further window gleamed a large marble Venus of Milo, charmingly executed, who stood regarding the welter with eyes calm and unconcerned.