Mr. Baruch stood, looking round him at the room. Everything in it was of his choosing, the trophy of some moment or some hour of delight. He had selected his own background.
"Ah Samuel!"
He turned, deliberate always. Between the portieres that screened the opposite doorway there stood the supreme "find" of his collection. Somewhere or other, between the processes of becoming an emperor in the machine-tool trade of southern Russia and an American citizen, Mr. Baruch so complete in himself, so perfect an entity had added to himself a wife. The taste that manifested itself alike on battered blue lacquer and worn prayer-rugs from Persia had not failed him then; he had found a thing perfect of its kind. From the uneasy Caucasus, where the harem-furnishers of Circassia jostle the woman-merchants of Georgia, he had brought back a prize. The woman who stood in the doorway, one strong bare arm uplifted to hold back the stamped leather curtain, was large a great white creature like a moving statue, with a still, blank face framed in banks of shining jet hair. The strong, lights of the chamber shone on her; she stood, still as an image, with large, incurious eyes, looking at him. All the Orient was immanent in her; she had the quiet, the resignation, the un-hope of the odalisque.
"Samuel," she said again.
"Ah, Adina!" And then, in the Circassian idiom, "Grace go before you!"
Her white arm sank and the curtains swelled together behind her. Mr.
Baruch took the chief of his treasures into his arms and kissed her.
The room in which presently they dined was tiny, like a cabinet particulier; they sat at food like lovers, with shutters closed upon the windows to defend their privacy. Mr. Baruch ate largely, and his great wife watched him across the table with still satisfaction. The linen of the table had been woven by the nuns of the Lavra at Kiev; the soup-bowls were from Cracow; there was nothing in the place that had not its quality and distinction. And Mr. Baruch fitted it as a snail fits its shell. It was his shell, for, like a snail, he had exuded it from his being and it was part of him.
"I saw a carpet to-day," he said abruptly. There was Black Sea salmon on his plate, and he spoke above a laden fork.
"Yes?" The big, quiet woman did not so much inquire as invite him to continue. Mr. Baruch ate some salmon. "A carpet yes," he said presently. "Real like Diamonds, like you, Adina, I no mistake."
At the compliment, she lowered her head and raised it again in a motion like a very slow nod. Mr. Baruch finished his salmon without further words.