ne before the house, and she had said that she should never
live there, and he had tried to coax her into courage about it. There
was no such facade as that on the whole street, to his thinking.
Through his long talks with the architect, he had come to feel almost
as intimately and fondly as the architect himself the satisfying
simplicity of the whole design and the delicacy of its detail. It
appealed to him as an exquisite bit of harmony appeals to the unlearned
ear, and he recognised the difference between this fine work and the
obstreperous pretentiousness of the many overloaded house-fronts which
Seymour had made him notice for his instruction elsewhere on the Back
Bay. Now, in the depths of his gloom, he tried to think what Italian
city it was where Seymour said he had first got the notion of treating
brick-work in that way.

He unlocked the temporary door with the key he always carried, so that
he could let himself in and out whenever he liked, and entered the
house, dim and very cold with the accumulated frigidity of the whole
winter in it, and looking as if the arrest of work upon it had taken
place a thousand years before. It smelt of the unpainted woods and the
clean, hard surfaces of the plaster, where the experiments in
decoration had left it untouched; and mingled with these odours was
that of some rank pigments and metallic compositions which Seymour had
used in trying to realise a certain daring novelty of finish, which had
not proved successful. Above all, Lapham detected the peculiar odour
of his own paint, with which the architect had been greatly interested
one day, when Lapham showed it to him at the office. He had asked
Lapham to let him try the Persis Brand in realising a little idea he
had for the finish of Mrs. Lapham's room. If it succeeded they could
tell her what it was, for a surprise.

Lapham glanced at the bay-window in the reception-room, where he sat
with his girls on the trestles when Corey first came by; and then he
explored the whole house to the attic, in the light faintly admitted
through the linen sashes. The floors were strewn with shavings and
chips which the carpenters had left, and in the music-room these had
been blown into long irregular windrows by the draughts through a wide
rent in the linen sash. Lapham tried to pin it up, but failed, and
stood looking out of it over the water. The ice had left the river,
and the low tide lay smooth and red in the light of the s