moods, elated by
applause, mimicking her old master, the idolatries of his worshippers,
Rosek, the girl dancer's upturned expectant lips. And he slipped his arm
round Gyp in the cab, crushing her against him and sniffing at her cheek
as if she had been a flower.

Rosek had the first floor of an old-time mansion in Russell Square. The
smell of incense or some kindred perfume was at once about one; and, on
the walls of the dark hall, electric light burned, in jars of alabaster
picked up in the East. The whole place was in fact a sanctum of the
collector's spirit. Its owner had a passion for black--the walls,
divans, picture-frames, even some of the tilings were black, with
glimmerings of gold, ivory, and moonlight. On a round black table there
stood a golden bowl filled with moonlight-coloured velvety "palm" and
"honesty"; from a black wall gleamed out the ivory mask of a faun's
face; from a dark niche the little silver figure of a dancing girl. It
was beautiful, but deathly. And Gyp, though excited always by anything
new, keenly alive to every sort of beauty, felt a longing for air and
sunlight. It was a relief to get close to one of the black-curtained
windows, and see the westering sun shower warmth and light on the trees
of the Square gardens. She was introduced to a Mr. and Mrs. Gallant, a
dark-faced, cynical-looking man with clever, malicious eyes, and one
of those large cornucopias of women with avid blue stares. The little
dancer was not there. She had "gone to put on nothing," Rosek informed
them.

He took Gyp the round of his treasures, scarabs, Rops drawings,
death-masks, Chinese pictures, and queer old flutes, with an air of
displaying them for the first time to one who could truly appreciate.
And she kept thinking of that saying, "Une technique merveilleuse." Her
instinct apprehended the refined bone-viciousness of this place, where
nothing, save perhaps taste, would be sacred. It was her first glimpse
into that gilt-edged bohemia, whence the generosities, the elans,
the struggles of the true bohemia are as rigidly excluded as from the
spheres where bishops moved. But she talked and smiled; and no one could
have told that her nerves were crisping as if at contact with a corpse.
While showing her those alabaster jars, her host had laid his hand
softly on her wrist, and in taking it away, he let his fingers, with a
touch softer than a kitten's paw, ripple over the skin, then put them
to his lips. Ah, there it