Having finished his cigarette, Paul withdrew into the conservatory, his sleeping room, half doll’s house and half bower, where the ivy had crept over the top of the casement and covered his ceiling with a web of leaves.  Shortly he was reposing upon his pillow, over which his holy-water font—­a large crimson heart of crystal with flames of burnished gold, set upon a tablet of white marble—­seemed almost to pulsate in the exquisite half-lights of approaching dawn.

It may not have been manly, or even masculine, for him thus literally to curtain his sleep, like a faun, with ivy; it may not have been orthodox for him to admit to his Valhalla some of the false Gods, and to honor them after a fashion; the one true God was duly adored, and all his saints appealed to in filial faith.  That was his nature and past changing; if he could not look upon God as a Jealous God visiting His judgments with fanatical justice upon the witted and half-witted, it was because his was a nature which had never been warped by the various social moral and religious influences brought to bear upon it.

He may have lacked judgment, in the eyes of the world, but he had never suffered seriously in consequence.  It may not have been wise for him to fondly nourish tastes and tendencies that were usually quite beyond his means; but he did it, and doing it afforded him the greatest pleasure in life.

You will pardon him all this; every one did sooner or later, even those who discountenanced similar weaknesses or affectations—­or whatever you are pleased to call them—­in anyone else, soon found an excuse for overlooking them in his case.

He was not, thank heaven, all things to all men; all things to a few, he may have been—­yea, even more than all else to some, so long as the spell lasted; to the majority, however, he was probably nothing, and less than nothing.  And what of that?  If he did little good in the world, he certainly did less evil, and, as he lay in his bed, under a white counterpane upon which the dawning light, sifting through the vines that curtained the glazed front of his sleeping room, fell in a mottled Japanese pattern, and while the ivy that covered the Gothic ceiling trailed long tendrils of the palest and most delicate green, each leaf glossed as if it had been varnished, this unheroic-hero, this pantheistic-devotee, this heathenized-Christian, this half-happy-go-lucky aethestic Bohemian, lay upon his pillow, the incarnation of absolute repose.

And so the morning broke, and the early birds began to chirp in the ivy and to prune their plumage and flutter among the leaves; and down the street tramped the feet of the toilers on their way to forge and dock.  Over the harbor came the daffodil light from the sun-tipped eastern hills, and it painted the waves that lapped the sleek sides of a yacht lying at anchor under the hill.  A yacht that Paul had watched many a day and dreamed of many a night; for he often longed with a great longing to slip cable and hie away, even unto the uttermost parts.