Books are nothing.  I discovered that I had never been aware before that the Civil War in America was not printed matter but a fact only about ten years old.  Of course.  He was a South Carolinian gentleman.  I was a little ashamed of my want of tact.  Meantime, looking like the conventional conception of a fashionable reveller, with his opera-hat pushed off his forehead, Captain Blunt was having some slight difficulty with his latch-key; for the house before which we had stopped was not one of those many-storied houses that made up the greater part of the street.  It had only one row of windows above the ground floor.  Dead walls abutting on to it indicated that it had a garden.  Its dark front presented no marked architectural character, and in the flickering light of a street lamp it looked a little as though it had gone down in the world.  The greater then was my surprise to enter a hall paved in black and white marble and in its dimness appearing of palatial proportions.  Mr. Blunt did not turn up the small solitary gas-jet, but led the way across the black and white pavement past the end of the staircase, past a door of gleaming dark wood with a heavy bronze handle.  It gave access to his rooms he said; but he took us straight on to the studio at the end of the passage.

It was rather a small place tacked on in the manner of a lean-to to the garden side of the house.  A large lamp was burning brightly there.  The floor was of mere flag-stones but the few rugs scattered about though extremely worn were very costly.  There was also there a beautiful sofa upholstered in pink figured silk, an enormous divan with many cushions, some splendid arm-chairs of various shapes (but all very shabby), a round table, and in the midst of these fine things a small common iron stove.  Somebody must have been attending it lately, for the fire roared and the warmth of the place was very grateful after the bone-searching cold blasts of mistral outside.

Mills without a word flung himself on the divan and, propped on his arm, gazed thoughtfully at a distant corner where in the shadow of a monumental carved wardrobe an articulated dummy without head or hands but with beautifully shaped limbs composed in a shrinking attitude, seemed to be embarrassed by his stare.

As we sat enjoying the bivouac hospitality (the dish was really excellent and our host in a shabby grey jacket still looked the accomplished man-about-town) my eyes kept on straying towards that corner.  Blunt noticed this and remarked that I seemed to be attracted by the Empress.

“It’s disagreeable,” I said.  “It seems to lurk there like a shy skeleton at the feast.  But why do you give the name of Empress to that dummy?”

“Because it sat for days and days in the robes of a Byzantine Empress to a painter. . .  I wonder where he discovered these priceless stuffs. . .  You knew him, I believe?”

Mills lowered his head slowly, then tossed down his throat some wine out of a Venetian goblet.