rville Congreve," said Rodney, offering it to his guest. "I
couldn't read him in a cheap edition."

When he was seen thus among his books and his valuables, amiably anxious
to make his visitor comfortable, and moving about with something of
the dexterity and grace of a Persian cat, Denham relaxed his critical
attitude, and felt more at home with Rodney than he would have done with
many men better known to him. Rodney's room was the room of a person
who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them from the rough
blasts of the public with scrupulous attention. His papers and his books
rose in jagged mounds on table and floor, round which he skirted with
nervous care lest his dressing-gown might disarrange them ever so
slightly. On a chair stood a stack of photographs of statues and
pictures, which it was his habit to exhibit, one by one, for the space
of a day or two. The books on his shelves were as orderly as
regiments of soldiers, and the backs of them shone like so many bronze
beetle-wings; though, if you took one from its place you saw a shabbier
volume behind it, since space was limited. An oval Venetian mirror stood
above the fireplace, and reflected duskily in its spotted depths the
faint yellow and crimson of a jarful of tulips which stood among the
letters and pipes and cigarettes upon the mantelpiece. A small piano
occupied a corner of the room, with the score of "Don Giovanni" open
upon the bracket.

"Well, Rodney," said Denham, as he filled his pipe and looked about him,
"this is all very nice and comfortable."

Rodney turned his head half round and smiled, with the pride of a
proprietor, and then prevented himself from smiling.

"Tolerable," he muttered.

"But I dare say it's just as well that you have to earn your own
living."

"If you mean that I shouldn't do anything good with leisure if I had
it, I dare say you're right. But I should be ten times as happy with my
whole day to spend as I liked."

"I doubt that," Denham replied.

They sat silent, and the smoke from their pipes joined amicably in a
blue vapor above their heads.

"I could spend three hours every day reading Shakespeare," Rodney
remarked. "And there's music and pictures, let alone the society of the
people one likes."

"You'd be bored to death in a year's time."

"Oh, I grant you I should be bored if I did nothing. But I should write
plays."

"H'm!"

"I should write plays," he repeated. "I've written three-quarters