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