s a picture and threw
it into relief. The great room, under the strong lights, showed the
conventional desert of polished parquet floor, with sparse furniture
grouped about it. There was an ivory-inlaid stand with a Benares
brass tray; a Circassian bridal linen-chest stood against a wall; the
tiles of the stove in the corner illustrated the life and martyrdom
of Saint Tikhon. Upon another wall was a trophy of old Cossack
swords. Before the linen-chest there stood a trunk of the kind that
every Russian housemaid takes with her to her employment a thing of
bent birchwood, fantastically painted in strong reds and blues. One
buys such things for the price of a cocktail.

Mr. Baruch stood, looking round him at the room. Everything in it was
of his choosing, the trophy of some moment or some hour of delight.
He had selected his own background.

"Ah Samuel!"

He turned, deliberate always. Between the portieres that screened the
opposite doorway there stood the supreme "find" of his collection.
Somewhere or other, between the processes of becoming an emperor in
the machine-tool trade of southern Russia and an American citizen,
Mr. Baruch so complete in himself, so perfect an entity had added to
himself a wife. The taste that manifested itself alike on battered
blue lacquer and worn prayer-rugs from Persia had not failed him
then; he had found a thing perfect of its kind. From the uneasy
Caucasus, where the harem-furnishers of Circassia jostle the
woman-merchants of Georgia, he had brought back a prize. The woman
who stood in the doorway, one strong bare arm uplifted to hold back
the stamped leather curtain, was large a great white creature like a
moving statue, with a still, blank face framed in banks of shining
jet hair. The strong, lights of the chamber shone on her; she stood,
still as an image, with large, incurious eyes, looking at him. All
the Orient was immanent in her; she had the quiet, the resignation,
the un-hope of the odalisque.

"Samuel," she said again.

"Ah, Adina!" And then, in the Circassian idiom, "Grace go before
you!"

Her white arm sank and the curtains swelled together behind her. Mr.
Baruch took the chief of his treasures into his arms and kissed her.

The room in which presently they dined was tiny, like a cabinet
particulier; they sat at food like lovers, with shutters closed upon
the windows to defend their privacy. Mr. Baruch ate largely, and his
great wife watched him across the table with