"I thought I knew you, Nan, but this is a revelation. I could never have guessed by the wildest leap of my imagination. It's beyond belief."
"Don't you like it?" she asked, with a hurt expression.
"I'm stunned. The most wonderful thing to me in the room, though, is not the bedstead, but the woman standing beside it."
A flash of light came from the dark eyes and the magnificent figure grew tense for a moment as she smiled with a look of inquiry.
"I'm lost in wonder at the riotous glory of your capacity for sensuous joy. I could imagine Juno on the heights of Olympus executing such a dream of mad luxury, but I could never have conceived of this, here, if I had not seen it. And yet, now that I see you in the setting, I'm sure you were made for it. The whole scheme is harmonious—it scares me——"
"Scares you?" she repeated with quick displeasure.
"Yes," he went on, jokingly. "It almost reconciles me to being a bachelor."
A look of pain swept the expressive face and he was sorry he had said it. The joke seemed out of harmony with her mood. She had taken herself seriously in the creation of this room, and had spent on it a round million. The effect it had produced on the man's mind was anything but flippant. He dared not tell how deeply he was moved, how every desire had awakened into fierce, cruel longing as the subtle scheme of sensuous dreaming had unfolded itself before his eyes. He began to wonder whether there were really any complexity or any mystery at all about her, whether she were not very simple and very elemental.
The picture she made standing in this wonderful room was one that never faded from his memory. The poise of her superb form; the fires that smouldered in the depths of her eyes; the tenderness with which her senses seemed to drink in the daring luxury; the smile that played about her lips, joyous, sensuous, cruel!
In vivid flashes he saw in her shining face the record of it all—the naked African hunters, crawling through forest jungles, stalking and bringing down in pools of blood the huge beasts who paid their tribute to her beauty; the army of toiling artists who bent their aching backs for days and weeks and months and years, carving the pictures in those white shining surfaces to please her fancy; the bowed figures of the weavers in Lyons and Brussels, these deft fingers working into matchless form the costly fabrics to please her eye and soothe the touch of her fingers as she drew back her curtains of purple and gold to let in the morning sunlight!