t where scandalized church-goers have been known
to truss up a little plaster copy of the inane Greek Slave in a
pocket-handkerchief, by way of needful drapery.

"What I want to know is, _why_ a lady should have to strip to the buff
just to play with a pigeon?" breathed John Flint, and his tone was
captious.

It did not strike me as being to the last degree whimsical,
improbable, altogether absurd, that such a man should pause at such a
time to comment upon art as he thinks it isn't. On the contrary it was
a consistent and coherent feature of that astounding nightmare in
which we figured. The absurd and the impossible always happen in
dreams. I am sure that if the dove on the woman's finger had opened
its painted bill and spoken, say about the binomial theorem, or the
Effect of Too Much Culture upon Women's Clubs, I should have listened
with equal gravity and the same abysmal absence of surprise. I
pattered platitudinously:

"The greatest of the Greeks considered the body divine in itself, my
son, and so their noblest art was nude. Some moderns have thought
there is no real art that is not nude. Truth itself is naked."

"Aha!" said my son, darkly. "I see! You take off your pants when you
go out to feed your chickens, say, and you're not bughouse. You're
art. Well, if Truth is naked, thank God the rest of us are liars!"

What I have here set down was but the matter of a moment. Flint
brushed it aside like a cobweb and set briskly about his real
business. Over in the recess next to the fireplace was the safe, and
before this he knelt.

"Hold the light!" he ordered in a curt whisper. "There--like that.
Steady now." My hand closed as well upon the rosary I carried, and I
clung to the beads as the shipwrecked cling to a spar. The familiar
feel of them comforted me.

I do not know to this day the make of that safe, nor its actual
strength, and I have always avoided questioning John Flint about it. I
do know it seemed incredibly strong, big, heavy, ungetatable. There
was a dark-colored linen cover on top of it, embroidered with yellow
marguerites and their stiff green leaves. And there was a brass
fern-jar with claw feet, and rings on the sides that somehow made me
think of fetters upon men's wrists.

"A little lower--to the left. So!" he ordered, and with steady fingers
I obeyed. He stood out sharply in the clear oval--the "cleverest crook
in all America" at work again, absorbed in his task, expert, a
mind-force pi