knows
what for!--but I can't see how to handle it except as funny stuff."

"But, for heaven's sake... what does he... CALL it?" muttered Denise
Ryland, holding a pair of gold rimmed pince-nez before her eyes, and
shifting them to and fro in an endeavor to focus the canvas.

"'Our Lady of the Poppies,'" replied the journalist. "Do you think it's
intended to mean anything in particular?"

The question was no light one; it embodied a problem not readily solved.
The scene depicted, and depicted with a skill, with a technical mastery
of the bizarre that had in it something horrible--was a long narrow
room--or, properly, cavern. The walls apparently were hewn from black
rock, and at regular intervals, placed some three feet from these
gleaming walls, uprose slender golden pillars supporting a kind of
fretwork arch which entirely masked the ceiling. The point of sight
adopted by the painter was peculiar. One apparently looked down into
this apartment from some spot elevated fourteen feet or more above the
floor level. The floor, which was black and polished, was strewn with
tiger skins; and little, inlaid tables and garishly colored cushions
were spread about in confusion, whilst cushioned divans occupied the
visible corners of the place. The lighting was very "advanced": a lamp,
having a kaleidoscopic shade, swung from the center of the roof low into
the room and furnished all the illumination.

Three doors were visible; one, directly in line at the further end of
the place, apparently of carved ebony inlaid with ivory; another, on the
right, of lemon wood or something allied to it, and inlaid with a design
in some emerald hued material; with a third, corresponding door, on the
left, just barely visible to the spectator.

Two figures appeared. One was that of a Chinaman in a green robe
scarcely distinguishable from the cushions surrounding him, who crouched
upon the divan to the left of the central door, smoking a long bamboo
pipe. His face was the leering face of a yellow satyr. But, dominating
the composition, and so conceived in form, in color, and in lighting, as
to claim the attention centrally, so that the other extravagant details
became but a setting for it, was another figure.

Upon a slender ivory pedestal crouched a golden dragon, and before the
pedestal was placed a huge Chinese vase of the indeterminate pink
seen in the heart of a rose, and so skilfully colored as to suggest
an internal luminousness. The v