e, another hanging upon the wall opposite him, one
underfoot each fine and singular in its manner He passed an eye over
them and then ceased to sec them. His benevolent face, with all its
suggestive reserve and its quiet shrewdness, fell vague with reverie.
It was in absence of mind rather than in presence of appetite that he
helped himself for the fourth time to the high-explosive liqueur from
the old Vilna decanter; and there flashed into sight before him, the
clearer for the spur with which the potent drink rowelled his
consciousness, the vision of the silk carpet, its glow, as though
fire were mixed with the dyes of it, the faultless Tightness and art
of its pattern, the soul-ensnaring perfection of the whole.

It was some hours later that he looked into his wife's room on his
way to his own. She was asleep, her quiet head cushioned upon the
waves of her hair. Mr. Baruch, half-burned cigar between his teeth,
stood and gazed at her. Her face, wiped clean of its powder, was
white as paper, with that deathlike whiteness which counts as beauty
in Circassia; only the shadows of her eyelids and the broad red of
her lips stained her pallor. Across her breast the red and blue hem
of the quilt lay like a scarf.

Mr. Baruch looked at the arrangement critically. He was a connoisseur
in perfection, and something was lacking. It eluded him for a moment
or two and then, suddenly, like an inspiration, he perceived it. The
rug the thing delicate as silk, with its sheen, its flush of hues,
with the white slumbering face above it! The picture, the perfect
thing he saw it!

The woman in the bed stirred and murmured.

"Blessings upon you," said Mr. Baruch, and smiled as he turned away.

"Bl-essings," she murmured sleepily, without opening her eyes, and
sighed and lay still once more.

The heart of man is a battle-ground where might is always right and
victory is always to the strongest of the warring passions. And even
a saint's passion to holiness is hardly stronger, more selfless, more
disregardful of conditions and obstacles than the passion of the
lover of the beautiful, the connoisseur, toward acquisition. In the
days that followed, Mr. Baruch, walking his quiet ways about the
city, working in the stillness of his office, acquired the sense that
the carpet, by the mere force of his desire, was somehow due to him a
thing only momentarily out of his hands, like one's brief loan to a
friend. Presently it would come his way and