school quailed at first before respectability, West
End rooms, and a man servant.

The adornments of the rooms were, to Mr. Blanchet's thinking, atrocious.
They were, indeed, only of the better class London lodgings style:
mirrors, and gilt, and white, and damask. There were doors where there
ought to have been curtains, carpets where artistic feeling would have
prescribed mats or rugs; there were no fans, not to say on the ceiling,
but even on the walls. The only suggestion of art in the place was a
plaster cast of the Venus of the Louvre which Heron himself had bought,
and which in all simplicity he adored. Mr. Blanchet held, first, that
all casts were nefarious, and next, that the Venus of Milo as a work of
art was beneath contempt. One of the divinities of his school had done
the only Venus which art could acknowledge as her own. This was, to be
sure, a picture, not a statue; but in Mr. Blanchet's mind it had settled
the Venus question for ever. The Lady Venus was draped from chin to toes
in a snuff-colored gown, and was represented as seated on a rock biting
the nails of a lank, greenish hand; and she had sunken cheeks, livid
eyes, and a complexion like that of the prairie sage grass. Any other
Venus made Herbert Blanchet shudder.

The books scattered about were dispiriting. There were Shakespeare,
Byron, and Browning. Mr. Blanchet had never read Shakespeare, considered
Byron below criticism, and could hardly restrain himself on the subject
of Browning. There were histories, and Mr. Blanchet scorned history;
there were blue books, and the very shade of blue which their covers
displayed would have made his soul sicken. It will be seen, therefore,
how awful is the impressiveness of respectability when, with all these
evidences of the lack of artistic taste around him, Mr. Blanchet still
felt himself dwarfed somehow in the presence of the occupier of the
rooms. It ought to be said in vindication of Mr. Heron, that that poor
youth was in nowise responsible for the adornments of the rooms, except
in so far as his plaster cast and his books were concerned. He had
never, up to this moment, noticed anything about the lodgings, except
that the rooms were pretty large, and that the locality was convenient
for his purposes and pursuits.

The two young men had some soda and brandy, and smoked and talked.
Blanchet was the poorest hand possible at smoking and drinking; but he
swallowed soda and brandy in repeated doses, while