landing a marble woman, decently covered from
neck to instep with stone draperies, advanced a row of lifeless toes
to the edge of the pedestal, and thrust out blindly a rigid white arm
holding a cluster of lights. He had artistic tastes--at home. Heavy
curtains caught back, half concealed dark corners. On the rich, stamped
paper of the walls hung sketches, water-colours, engravings. His tastes
were distinctly artistic. Old church towers peeped above green masses
of foliage; the hills were purple, the sands yellow, the seas sunny, the
skies blue. A young lady sprawled with dreamy eyes in a moored boat, in
company of a lunch basket, a champagne bottle, and an enamoured man in
a blazer. Bare-legged boys flirted sweetly with ragged maidens, slept
on stone steps, gambolled with dogs. A pathetically lean girl flattened
against a blank wall, turned up expiring eyes and tendered a flower for
sale; while, near by, the large photographs of some famous and mutilated
bas-reliefs seemed to represent a massacre turned into stone.

He looked, of course, at nothing, ascended another flight of stairs and
went straight into the dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail
to a bracket writhed away from the wall in calm convolutions, and
held, between the conventional fury of its jaws, a crude gas flame that
resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of course; but, as he stepped
in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many people; because
the strips of glass on the doors of wardrobes and his wife's large
pier-glass reflected him from head to foot, and multiplied his image
into a crowd of gentlemanly and slavish imitators, who were dressed
exactly like himself; had the same restrained and rare gestures; who
moved when he moved, stood still with him in an obsequious immobility,
and had just such appearances of life and feeling as he thought it
dignified and safe for any man to manifest. And like real people who are
slaves of common thoughts, that are not even their own, they affected a
shadowy independence by the superficial variety of their movements. They
moved together with him; but they either advanced to meet him, or walked
away from him; they appeared, disappeared; they seemed to dodge behind
walnut furniture, to be seen again, far within the polished panes,
stepping about distinct and unreal in the convincing illusion of a
room. And like the men he respected they could be trusted to do nothing
individual, original, or s