save to keep up a commonplace conversation in which I took no absorbing
interest. It was a direct challenge. Young Dale stopped playing with the
Chow dog and grinned. It behooved me to say something. I said it with a
bow and a wave of my hand:

"Because, though your father was a lion-tamer, your mother was a woman."

She appeared to reflect for a moment; then addressing Dale:

"The answer doesn't amount to a ha'porth of cats'-meat, but you couldn't
have got out of it like that."

I was again disconcerted, but I remarked that he would learn in time
when my mentorship was over and I handed him, a finished product, to
society.

"How long will that be?" she asked.

"I don't know. Are you anxious for his immediate perfecting?"

Her shoulders gave what in ordinary women would have been a shrug: with
her it was a slow ripple. I vow if her neck had been bare one could have
seen it undulate beneath the skin.

"What is perfection?"

"Can you ask?" laughed Dale. "Behold!" And he pointed to me.

"That's cheap," said the lady. "I've heard Auguste say cleverer things."

"Who's Auguste?" asked Dale.

"Auguste," said I, "is the generic name of the clown in the French
Hippodrome."

"Oh, the Circus!" cried Dale.

"I'll be glad if you'll teach him to call it the Hippodrome, Mr. de
Gex," she remarked, with another of her slumberous glances.

"That will be one step nearer perfection," said I.

The short November twilight had deepened into darkness; the fire, which
was blazing when we entered, had settled into a glow, and the room was
lit by one shaded lamp. To me the dimness was restful, but Dale, who,
with the crude instincts of youth, loves glare, began to fidget, and
presently asked whether he might turn on the electric light. Permission
was given. My hostess invited me to smoke and, to hand her a box of
cigarettes which lay on the mantelpiece, I rose, bent over her while
she lit her cigarette from my match, and resuming an upright position,
became rooted to the hearthrug.

With the flood of illumination, disclosing everything that hitherto had
been wrapped in shadow and mystery, came a shock.

It was a most extraordinary, perplexing room. The cheap and the costly,
the rare and the common, the exquisite and the tawdry jostled one
another on walls and floor. At one end of the Louis XVI sofa on which
Dale had been sitting lay a boating cushion covered with a Union Jack,
at the other a cushion covered with old Moorish