rned with a lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together a
phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer: "La signora e
fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took to mean: "She's out--but you'll
soon see."

What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded
shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known. He knew that the
Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her--bits of
wreckage, she called them--and these, he supposed, were represented by
some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek bronze
on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the
discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in
old frames.

Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art. His
boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest
books: John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee's "Euphorion," the essays of
P. G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called "The Renaissance" by
Walter Pater. He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra
Angelico with a faint condescension. But these pictures bewildered
him, for they were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and
therefore able to see) when he travelled in Italy; and perhaps, also,
his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding
himself in this strange empty house, where apparently no one expected
him. He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of Countess
Olenska's request, and a little disturbed by the thought that his
betrothed might come in to see her cousin. What would she think if she
found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting
alone in the dusk at a lady's fireside?

But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and
stretched his feet to the logs.

It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him;
but Archer felt more curious than mortified. The atmosphere of the
room was so different from any he had ever breathed that
self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure. He had been
before in drawing-rooms hung with red damask, with pictures "of the
Italian school"; what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's
shabby hired house, with its blighted background of pampas grass and
Rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful use of a
few properties, been transformed into something intimate, "foreign,"
subtly suggestive of old romantic sc