I noticed a figure I thought I knew lounging at the foot of the stair.
It was Scrymgeour himself, and he was smoking the Arcadia. We greeted
each other languidly on the doorstep, Scrymgeour assuring me that "Japan
in London" was a grand idea. It gave a zest to life, banishing the poor,
weary conventionalities of one's surroundings. This was said while we
still stood at the door, and I began to wonder why Scrymgeour did not
enter his rooms. "A beautiful night," he said, rapturously. A cruel east
wind was blowing. He insisted that evening was the time for thinking,
and that east winds brace you up. Would I have a cigar? I would if he
asked me inside to smoke it. My friend sighed. "I thought I told you,"
he said, "that I don't smoke in my chambers. It isn't the thing." Then
he explained, hesitatingly, that he hadn't given up smoking. "I come
down here," he said, "with my pipe, and walk up and down. I assure you
it is quite a new sensation, and I much prefer it to lolling in an
easy-chair." The poor fellow shivered as he spoke, and I noticed that
his great-coat was tightly buttoned up to the throat. He had a hacking
cough and his teeth were chattering. "Let us go in," I said; "I don't
want to smoke." He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and opened his
door with an affectation of gayety.

The room looked somewhat more home-like now, but it was very cold.
Scrymgeour had no fire yet. He had been told that the smoke would
blacken his moon. Besides, I question if he would have dared to remove
the fan from the fireplace without consulting a Japanese authority. He
did not even know whether the Japanese burned coal. I missed a number of
the articles of furniture that had graced his former rooms. The easels
were gone; there were none of the old canvases standing against the
wall, and he had exchanged his comfortable, plain old screen for one
with lizards crawling over it. "It would never have done," he explained,
"to spoil the room with English things, so I got in some more Japanese
furniture."

I asked him if he had sold his canvases; whereupon he signed me
to follow him to the wine-bin. It was full of them. There were no
newspapers lying about; but Scrymgeour hoped to manage to take one in
by and by. He was only feeling his way at present, he said. In the dim
light shed by a Japanese lamp, I tripped over a rainbow-colored slipper
that tapered to the heel and turned up at the toe. "I wonder you can get
into these things," I whisp