rquet, with pleased and
deferential alacrity to bid Monsieur or Madame welcome, to offer a
chair and the incense of one's interest and delight in service. One
added oneself to the quality of the big, still apartment, with its
antique furniture, its celebrities and notorieties pictured upon its
walls, its great chandelier, a-shiver with glass lusters hanging
overhead like an aerial iceberg. No noises entered from the street;
here, the business of being photographed was magnified to a
solemnity; one drugged one's victim with pomp before leading him to
the camera.

"I could do it," thought Annette. "I'm sure I could do it. I could
fit into all this like a like a snail into a shell. I'd want shoes
that didn't slide on the parquet; and then oh, if only this comes
off!"

A small noise behind her made her turn quickly. The door by which the
footman had departed was concealed by a portiere of heavy velvet; a
hand had moved it aside and a face was looking round the edge of it
at her. As she turned, the owner of it came forward into the room,
and she rose.

"Be seated, be seated!" protested the newcomer in a high emasculate
voice, and she sat down again obediently upon the little
spindle-legged Empire settee from which she had risen.

"And you have come in consequence of the advertisement?" said the man
with a little giggle. "Yes; yes! We will see, then!"

He stood in front of her, half-way across the room, staring at her.
He was a man somewhere in the later thirties, wearing the velvet
jacket, the cascading necktie, the throat-revealing collar, and the
overlong hair which the conventions of the theatre have established
as the livery of the artist. The details of this grotesque foppery
presented themselves to Annette only vaguely; it was at the man
himself as he straddled in the middle of the polished floor, staring
at her, that she gazed with a startled attention a face like the
feeble and idiot countenance of an old sheep, with the same flattened
length of nose and the same weakly demoniac touch in the curve and
slack hang of the wide mouth. It was not that he was merely ugly or
queer to the view; it seemed to Annette that she was suddenly in the
presence of something monstrous and out of the course of Nature. His
eyes, narrow and seemingly colorless, regarded her with a fatuous
complacency.

She flushed and moved in her seat under his long scrutiny. The
creature sighed.

"Yes," he said, always in the same high, dead