"Oh yes," she answered, "I dare say my words are wild. I dare say they
only mean that I loathe my luxury from the bottom of my soul, and long to
be rid of it, if I only could, without harm to others and with safety to
myself."




XXI


It seemed to me that I became suddenly sensible of this luxury for the
first time. I had certainly been aware that I was in a large and stately
house, and that I had been served and banqueted with a princely pride and
profusion. But there had, somehow, been through all a sort of simplicity,
a sort of quiet, so that I had not thought of the establishment and its
operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs. Makely's far inferior
scale of living; or else, what with my going about so much in society, I
was ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts as I had been
at first. But I was better qualified to judge of what I saw, and I had
now a vivid sense of the costliness of Mrs. Strange's environment. There
were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot; there were tens of
thousands in the pictures on the walls. In a bronze group that withdrew
itself into a certain niche, with a faint reluctance, there was the value
of a skilled artisan's wage for five years of hard work; in the bindings
of the books that showed from the library shelves there was almost as
much money as most of the authors had got for writing them. Every
fixture, every movable, was an artistic masterpiece; a fortune, as
fortunes used to be counted even in this land of affluence, had been
lavished in the mere furnishing of a house which the palaces of nobles