"Of course," she said happily. "What can I have been thinking of? When the poor man comes out Mr. Baruch can make his own bargain with him; but till then I promised!"
Selby, with slipping glasses awry on his' nose, gaped at her.
"Promised!" he repeated. "That that hobo."
Mr. Baruch intervened.
"But, Selby, my friend, Miss Pilgrim is quite right. She promised; and it is only two or three days to wait, and also it is not the only rug in the world. Though," he added generously, "it is a nice rug yes?"
Miss Pilgrim smiled at him gratefully; Selby shrugged, and just caught his glasses as the shrug shook them loose.
"Fix it to suit yourselves," he snarled, and moved away toward his untidy desk by the window.
The pale autumn sun had dissolved in watery splendors as Mr. Baruch, with the wide astrakhan collar of his overcoat turned up about his ears, walked easily homeward in the brisk evening chill. There were lights along the wharves, and the broad waters of the port, along which his road lay, were freckled with the spark-like lanterns on the ships, each with its little shimmer of radiance reflected from the stream. Commonly, as he strolled, he saw it all with gladness; the world and the fullness thereof were ministers of his pleasure; but upon this night he saw it absently, with eyes that dwelt beyond it all. Outwardly, he was the usual Mr. Baruch; his slightly sluggish benevolence of demeanor was unchanged as he returned the salute of a policeman upon a corner, but inwardly he was like a man uplifted by good news. The sense of pure beauty, buried in his being, stirred like a rebellious slave. Those arabesques, that coloring, that texture thrilled him like a gospel.
It was in the same mood of abstraction that he let himself into his flat in the great German-built apartment-house that overlooked the "boulevard" and the thronged river. He laid aside his overcoat in the little hall, conventional with its waxed wood and its mirror, clicked an electric-light switch and passed through a portiere into the salon, which was the chief room of his abode. A large room, oblong and high-ceilinged, designed by a man with palace architecture that obsession of the Russian architect on the brain. He advanced to it, still with that vagueness of sense, and stopped, looking round him.
It was part of the effect which Mr. Baruch made upon those who came into contact with him that few suspected him of a home, a domesticity of his own; he was so complete, so compactly self-contained, without appanages of that kind. Here, however, was the frame of his real existence, which contained it as a frame contains a picture and threw it into relief. The great room, under the strong lights, showed the conventional desert of polished parquet floor, with sparse furniture grouped about it. There was an ivory-inlaid stand with a Benares brass tray; a Circassian bridal linen-chest stood against a wall; the tiles of the stove in the corner illustrated the life and martyrdom of Saint Tikhon. Upon another wall was a trophy of old Cossack swords. Before the linen-chest there stood a trunk of the kind that every Russian housemaid takes with her to her employment a thing of bent birchwood, fantastically painted in strong reds and blues. One buys such things for the price of a cocktail.