"Iss t'ere a difference?" asked Pelletan, fumbling with the lock.
"A sty is for pigs and a kennel for dogs," Rushford explained. "A den is for wild beasts. These niceties of the English language are not for you, Pelletan."
"Still," persisted Pelletan, "a man iss no more a wild beast t'an he iss a dog or a pig."
"Not nearly so much so, very often," agreed Rushford, heartily. "You have me there, Pelletan. Sty would undoubtedly be the right word in many cases."
"Fery well, t'en," said Pelletan, proudly, opening the door, "pehold my sty!" and he stood aside that his companion might enter.
It was a little square box of a room jammed with such a litter of bric-à-brac as is to be picked up only on the boulevards—trifles in Bohemian glass, a lizard stuffed with straw, carved fragments of jade and ivory, a Sèvres vase bearing the portrait of Du Barry, an Indian chibook, a pink-cheeked Dresden shepherdess, a sabre of the time of Napoleon, a leering Hindoo idol, a hideous dragon in Japanese bronze grimacing furiously at a Barye lion—all of them huddled together without order or arrangement, as they would have been in an auction room or an antique shop. In one corner stood a low table of Italian mosaic, bearing a somewhat battered statuette of Saint Geneviève plying her distaff, and the walls were fairly covered with photographs— photographs, for the most part, of women more anxious to display their charms of person to an admiring world than to observe the rigour of convention.
Rushford dropped into one of the two chairs, got out a cigar, lighted it, and sat for some moments looking around at this wilderness of gimcracks.
"Pelletan, you're a humbug," he said at last. "You came to me yesterday and said your last franc was gone."
"Unt so it wass, monsieur."
"But this collection ought to be worth something."