rank of windows so heavily
curtained that one might have suspected those within to live in
darkness, fearing even to face the sunlight. I laughed. When I had
been searching for the girl with the blue feathers in her hat, I had
never given this house more than a passing glance, deeming it
altogether too palatial in its size and too severe in its aspect to
shield a man of so garish a mind as I attributed to Rufus Blight,
judging him from memory alone. I should have placed him rather next
door to it, behind the over-ornate Moorish front and had him look out
on the world through curtains of elaborately figured lace. But within,
I now said to myself, I shall find the expression of the man in a riot
of color in walls and hangings and in ill-assorted mobs of furniture.
Here again I was wrong. We passed the grilled doors into a place so
gray and cold that it might have led us to a cloister. We mounted
broad stairs, our footfalls muffled by a heavy carpeting of so
unobtrusive a color that I cannot name it. We crossed a white panelled
hall, so sparsely furnished that the untutored might have thought that
the family were just moving in or just moving out. Penelope pushed
through heavy portieres and we stood at last in a room that seemed
designed for human habitation. But it was the design of an alien mind,
not of the owner. The owner had not been allowed to fit it to himself
as he would his clothes. The alien mind had said: You do not know; you
must allow me to arrange your habitat. Here I have placed the
wonderful old fireplace which I bought for you in France, and above it
the Reynolds for which you paid forty thousand dollars; here in the
centre is the carved table which I got for you in Florence, and
geometrically arranged about its corners are books of travel; with its
back to it, a great divan covered with most expensive leather, so that
you can lounge in its depths and watch the fire. Around it I have
arranged sundry other chairs done in deep-green velour to tone in with
the walls, and along the walls are bookcases, fronted with diamond
panes and filled with leather-bound volumes--for this, sir, is your
library.

The room was so perfect that Mrs. Bannister, seated before the fire,
brewing herself a lonely cup of tea, seemed a jarring note. She would
have been as much in place in a corner of the _Galerie-de-Glace_ at
Versailles, and but for her presence and her domestic occupation I
might have said to myself a