ce from home this great, water-girt
city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting
its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of
to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.

The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of
pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the
specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of
a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two
windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a
corner.

The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in
speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to
him of its divers tenantry.

A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical
islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the
gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from
house to house--The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding
Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe
outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn
rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was
some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky
sail had borne them to a fresh port--a trifling vase or two, pictures
of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.

One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the
little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed
a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser
told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger prints on
the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and
air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb,
witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its
contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with
a diamond in staggering letters the name "Marie." It seemed that the
succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury--perhaps
tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness--and wreaked upon
it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch,
distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been
slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some mo