resting on the arms of an easy chair. "Ten thousand
red-hot devils are boring ten thousand holes through my foot," he said.
"If you touch the pillow on my stool, I shall fly at your throat." He
poured some cooling lotion from a bottle into a small watering-pot, and
irrigated his foot as if it had been a bed of flowers. By way of further
relief to the pain, he swore ferociously; addressing his oaths to
himself, in thunderous undertones which made the glasses ring on the
sideboard.

Relieved, in his present frame of mind, to have escaped the necessity
of shaking hands, Ovid took a chair, and looked about him. Even here
he discovered but little furniture, and that little of the heavy
old-fashioned sort. Besides the sideboard, he perceived a dining-table,
six chairs, and a dingy brown carpet. There were no curtains on the
window, and no pictures or prints on the drab-coloured walls. The empty
grate showed its bleak black cavity undisguised; and the mantelpiece had
nothing on it but the doctor's dirty and strong-smelling pipe. Benjulia
set down his watering-pot, as a sign that the paroxysm of pain had
passed away. "A dull place to live in, isn't it?" In those words he
welcomed the visitor to his house.

Irritated by the accident which had forced him into the repellent
presence of Benjulia, Ovid answered in a tone which matched the doctor
on his own hard ground.

"It's your own fault if the place is dull. Why haven't you planted
trees, and laid out a garden?"

"I dare say I shall surprise you," Benjulia quietly rejoined; "but I
have a habit of speaking my mind. I don't object to a dull place; and I
don't care about trees and gardens."

"You don't seem to care about furniture either," said Ovid.

Now that he was out of pain for awhile, the doctor's innate
insensibility to what other people might think of him, or might say to
him, resumed its customary torpor in its own strangely unconscious way.
He seemed only to understand that Ovid's curiosity was in search of
information about trifles. Well, there would be less trouble in giving
him his information, than in investigating his motives. So Benjulia
talked of his furniture.

"I dare say you're right," he said. "My sister-in-law--did you know
I had a relation of that sort?--my sister-in-law got the tables and
chairs, and beds and basins. Buying things at shops doesn't interest me.
I gave her a cheque; and I told her to furnish a room for me to eat in,
and a room for me