As soon as the front door closed, Joris perceived that he was in an unusual house.  The scents and odours of strange countries floated about it.  The hall contained many tall jars, full of pungent gums and roots; and upon its walls the weapons of savage nations were crossed in idle and harmless fashion.  They went slowly up the highly polished stairway into a large, low parlour, facing the vivid, everyday business drama of Broadway; but the room itself was like an Arabian Night’s dream, for the Eastern atmosphere was supplemented by divans and sofas covered with rare cashmere shawls, and rugs of Turkestan, and with cushions of all kinds of oriental splendour.  Strange tables of wonderful mosaic work held ivory carvings of priceless worth; and porcelain from unknown lands.  Gods and goddesses from the yellow Gehenna of China and the utterable idolatry of India, looked out with brute cruelty, or sempiternal smiles from every odd corner; or gazed with a fascinating prescience from the high chimney-piece upon all who entered.

The effect upon Hyde was instantaneous and uncanny.  His Saxon-Dutch nature was in instant revolt against influences so foreign and unnatural.  Arenta was unconsciously in sympathy with him; for she said with a shrug of her pretty shoulders, as she looked around, “I have always bad dreams after a visit to this room.  Do these things have a life of their own?  Look at the creature on that corner shelf!  What a serene disdain is in his smile!  He seems to gaze into the very depths of your soul.  I see that there is a curtain to his shrine; and I shall take leave to draw it.”  With these words she went to the scornful divinity, and shut his offending eyes behind the folds of his gold-embroidered curtain.

Hyde watched her flitting about the strange room, and thought of a little brown wren among the poisonous, vivid splendours of tropical swamp flowers.  So out of place the pretty, thoughtless Dutch girl looked among the spoils of far India, and Central America, and of Arabian and African worship and workmanship.  But when the door opened, and Madame Jacobus, with soft, gliding footsteps entered, Hyde understood how truly the soul, if given the wherewithal, builds the habitation it likes best.  Once possessed of marvellous beauty, and yet extraordinarily interesting, she seemed the very genius of the room and its strange, suggestive belongings.  She was unusually tall, and her figure had kept its undulating, stately grace.  Her hair, dazzlingly white, was piled high above her ample brow, held in place with jewelled combs and glittering pins.  Her face had lost its fine oval and youthful freshness, but who of any feeling or intelligence would not have far preferred the worn countenance, expressing in a thousand sensitive shades and emotions the story of her life and love?  And if every other beauty had failed, Angelica’s eyes would have atoned for the loss.  They were large, softly-black, slow-moving, or again, in a moment, flashing with the fire that lay hidden in the dark pit of the iris.