he was no
fool. It was almost uncannily clever, the way all the latest devices for
modern comfort wore, so demurely, the mask of a perfectly consistent
medievalism. And there were some effects that were really magnificent.
The view of the drawing-room, for instance, from the recessed dais at
the far end of it, where the grand piano stood--a piano that contrived
to look as if it might have been played upon by the second wife of Henry
VIII,--down toward the magnificent stone chimney at the other; the
octagonal dining-room with the mysterious audacity of its lighting; the
kitchen with its flag floor (only they were not flags, but an artful
linoleum), its great wrought-iron chains and hoods beneath which all the
cooking was done--by electricity.

Randolph took him over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it
all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it
becoming more and more marked all the while.

They brought up at last in the study they had started from.

"Oh, but wait a moment!" Randolph said. "Here's two more rooms for you
to see."

The first one explained its purpose at a glance, with a desk and
typewriter, and filing cabinets around the walls.

"Rubber floor," Randolph pointed out, "felt ceiling; absolutely
sound-proof. Here's where my stenographer sits all day, ready,--like a
fireman. And this," he concluded, leading the way to the other room, "is
the holy of holies."

It had a rubber floor, too, and Rodney supposed, a felt ceiling. But its
only furniture was one straight-back chair and a canvas cot.

"Sound-proof too," said Randolph. "But sounding-boards or something in
all the walls. I press this button, start a dictaphone, and talk in any
direction, anywhere. It's all taken down. Here's where I'm supposed to
think, make discoveries, and things. No distractions. One hundred per
cent. efficient. My God! I tried it for a while. Felt like a fool actor
in a Belasco play. Do you remember? The one with the laboratory and the
doctor?"

They went back into the study.

"Clever beasts, though--poodles," he remarked, as he nodded Rodney to
his chair and poured himself another drink. "Learn their tricks very
nicely. But good Heavens, Aldrich, think of him as a man! Think what our
American married women are up against, when they want somebody to play
off against their husbands and have to fall back on tired little beasts
like that. In all the older countries there are plenty of men, r