Mr. Baruch looked at the arrangement critically. He was a connoisseur in perfection, and something was lacking. It eluded him for a moment or two and then, suddenly, like an inspiration, he perceived it. The rug the thing delicate as silk, with its sheen, its flush of hues, with the white slumbering face above it! The picture, the perfect thing he saw it!
The woman in the bed stirred and murmured.
"Blessings upon you," said Mr. Baruch, and smiled as he turned away.
"Bl-essings," she murmured sleepily, without opening her eyes, and sighed and lay still once more.
The heart of man is a battle-ground where might is always right and victory is always to the strongest of the warring passions. And even a saint's passion to holiness is hardly stronger, more selfless, more disregardful of conditions and obstacles than the passion of the lover of the beautiful, the connoisseur, toward acquisition. In the days that followed, Mr. Baruch, walking his quiet ways about the city, working in the stillness of his office, acquired the sense that the carpet, by the mere force of his desire, was somehow due to him a thing only momentarily out of his hands, like one's brief loan to a friend. Presently it would come his way and be his; and it belongs to his sense of security in his right that not once, not even when he remembered it most avidly, did he think of the expedient of buying it from the sick peddler by paying him the value of it.
Another man would probably have gone forthwith to Selby, told him the secret, and enlisted his aid; but Mr. Baruch did not work like that. He allowed chance a week in which to show its reasonableness; and not till then, nothing having happened, did he furnish himself, one afternoon, with an excuse, in the form of a disputed customs charge, and cross the narrow landing to the American Vice-Consulate.
Selby was there alone at his disorderly desk by the window, fussing feebly among the chaos of his tumbled papers, and making a noise of desperation with his lips like a singing kettle.
"Ah, Selby, my friend!" Mr. Baruch went smilingly forward. "You work always too much. And now come I with a little other thing for you. It is too bad yes?"
"Hallo, Baruch!" returned Selby. "You're right about the working. Here I keep a girl to keep my papers in some kind of a sort of order and I been hunting and digging for an hour to find one of 'em. It gets me what she thinks I pay her for! Hoboes an' that kind o' trash, that's her style."
Mr. Baruch had still his agreeable, mild smile, which was as much a part of his daily wear as his trousers. He could not have steered the talk to better purpose.