uced an
eighteenth century air. The walls of her sitting room and bedroom were
remolded in chaste panels of French gray; the new rugs and the canopied
window curtains were the palest orange. Her desk, the most vivid
object in her sitting room, pleased her especially--a high Venetian
desk of green and gold lacquer with pigeon holes and writing shelf of
gold and red. She thought of the letters that must have been written
there by women with dark eyes and powdered coiffures.

Then she sighed. A look of wonder and depression was reflected by a
mirror framed in gilt; and she turned to stare at a vase in which stood
a bouquet of Louis XVI flowers, a soft blending of mauve, faint yellow,
rose, and pale blue, all fashioned out of tin.

"Tin flowers! Great heavens, what was I thinking of?"

She had only now realized the mockery of them. She rang for a maid,
and said:

"Throw this thing out."

CHAPTER XXXII

In September David began to write his tone poem, _Marco Polo_.

It was not Marco Polo alone, but every man of extraordinary
aspirations, who took that long journey, through semimythical deserts,
into the realm of the Great Khan, and there for many years lived a life
unrelated to the lives of his boyhood companions.

In far-off Cambulac the Venetian adventurer steeped himself in sights,
odors, and sounds that were the antithesis of those which he had known,
till at last he took on the strangeness of his surroundings. Yet in
the course of time, though covered with wealth and honors, and
habituated to bizarre delights, he began, with the perversity of human
nature, to long for the land of his birth. With a sense of necessity
and foreboding he tore himself loose from the paradise of Cambulac,
traversed the deserts again, regained his own house. None knew him,
for he was old, savory with antipodal spices, outlandishly garbed; and
even his countenance had become like those Oriental faces amid which he
had found unheard-of griefs and joys. In Venice, his birthplace,
instead of a greeting that might ease his nostalgia, he encountered
disbelief in his identity, and ridicule of his tales. He could not
make them credulous of that delicious Cambulac where he had dwelt like
a god: his tidings of unearthly felicities--free to all who would make
that journey--fell upon brutish ears. The very children came to laugh
him to scorn. So finally, stunned by this ingratitude, cut to the
heart by the gibes of these Venet