dows there overlooked a bit of tangled garden
with a few dilapidated statues. It was Marshall of course who undertook the
task of furnishing, and he lavished on the rooms the fancies of an
imagination that suggested the collaboration of a courtesan of high degree
and a fifth-rate artist. Nevertheless, our salon was a pretty
resort--English cretonne of a very happy design--vine leaves, dark green
and golden, broken up by many fluttering jays. The walls were stretched
with this colourful cloth, and the armchairs and the couches were to match.
The drawing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of the ceiling
and looped up to give the appearance of a tent; a faun, in terra cotta,
laughed in the red gloom, and there were Turkish couches and lamps. In
another room you faced an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of the Apollo,
and a bust of Shelley. The bedrooms were made unconventual with cushioned
seats and rich canopies; and in picturesque corners there were censers,
great church candlesticks, and palms; then think of the smell of burning
incense and wax and you will have imagined the sentiment of our apartment
in Rue de la Tour des Dames. I bought a Persian cat, and a python that made
a monthly meal off guinea pigs; Marshall, who did not care for pets, filled
his rooms with flowers--he used to sleep beneath a tree of gardenias in
full bloom. We were so, Henry Marshall and Edwin Dayne, when we went to
live in 76, Rue de la Tour des Dames, we hoped for the rest of our lives.
He was to paint, I was to write.

Before leaving for the seaside I had bought some volumes of Hugo and De
Musset; but in pleasant, sunny Boulogne poetry went flat, and it was not
until I got into my new rooms that I began to read seriously. Books are
like individuals; you know at once if they are going to create a sense
within the sense, to fever, to madden you in blood and brain, or if they
will merely leave you indifferent, or irritable, having unpleasantly
disturbed sweet intimate musings as might a draught from an open window.
Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book,
when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a
voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine
depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above
all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me.
Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great