? Good. Can you find me a teacher somewhere?"

The door opened to frame a careworn woman in a gingham dress, who said
shyly to Lilla:

"Oh, excuse me, ma'am. I thought----" And to Parr, "I'll keep your
supper warm."

With her sleek bandeaux of lusterless brown hair, and her thick,
straight eyebrows meeting above her nose, she looked like some model
for a fifteenth century Italian painter, who had suddenly faded and now
was exiled from the studio to the region of pots and pans. She was
Parr's niece.

As Lilla departed down the black staircase redolent of boiled cabbage,
she reflected that these surroundings were going to contaminate the sad
pleasure that she planned to obtain through Parr. Her instinctive
epicureanism demanded that the scene of these evocations should not be
sordid.

Besides, it was intolerable that Parr, of whom Lawrence had been fond,
should not be better housed.

So Lilla moved Parr and his astounded relatives to a pretty little
dwelling in Greenwich Village, with waxed floors, chintz hangings at
the windows, and Delia Robbia plaques in the sitting room. After
seeing them installed, she said to herself:

"Poor things! How abominable I am!"

At any rate, there was nothing abominable in her having sent Parr to a
surgeon who, though he doubted that the patient would ever be quite
well again, guaranteed to abolish the crutches.

On the day that Parr was to go to the hospital, Lilla entered the
Greenwich Village house to find a stranger sitting under the Delia
Robbia plaques, He rose with a graceful dignity, bowed, and stood
gazing down at her out of dark, lustrous eyes.

Parr explained that this stranger was prepared to give lessons in
Arabic.

He was in his early twenties, though one did not immediately appreciate
his youth because of a very delicate black beard that softened, without
concealing, the lines of his chin. His features appeared to have been
chiseled with great precision out of some pale, tan-colored marble; his
nose was long and straight; his full eyelids gave him a slightly
languorous look; but his lips, as sharply defined as a gem of
carnelian, seemed somehow to be ascetic as well as sensual--virile as
well as effete. Tall and spare, with small hands, he wore an
outrageously inappropriate, ill-fitting sack suit. To Lilla it was as
if some romantic young character from the tales of Scheherazade had
been degraded for his gallantries in this hideous attire.

His na