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 

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