In truth, the change in it was marked.  The grand piano had vanished, and in its place stood an enormous cabinet made of wood, stained black, and covered with grotesque gold figures, whose unnatural faces were twisted into the expressions of all the vices.  Some of these faces smiled, others scowled, others protruded forked tongues like snakes and seemed to hiss along the blackness of the background.  The shapes of the figures were voluptuous and yet suggested, rather than fully revealed, deformity, as if the minds of these monsters sought to reveal their distortion by the very lines of their curved and wanton limbs.  Upon the top of this cabinet stood a gigantic rose-coloured jar filled with orchids, the Messalinas of the hothouse, whose mauve corruption and spotted faces leered down to greet the gold goblins beneath.  It was easy to imagine them whispering to each other soft histories of unknown sins, and jeering at the corrupt respectabilities of London, as they clustered together and leaned above the ruddy ramparts of the china, wild flowers as no hedgerow violet, or pale smirking primrose, is ever wild in the farthest wood.

Glancing from this cabinet, and those that stood upon it, the doctor was aware of a deep and dusty note of red in the room, sounding from carpet and walls, tingling drowsily in the window curtains and in the cushions that lay upon the couches.  This was not the crude and cheerful sealing-wax red with which the festive Philistine loves to dye the whiteness of his dining-room walls, cooling its chubby absurdity with panels of that old oak, which is forever new.  It was a dim and deep colour, such as a dust-filmed ruby might emit if illuminated by a soft light.  And Valentine had shrouded it so adroitly that though it pervaded the entire room, it always seemed distant and remote, a background, vast perhaps, but clouded and shadowed by nearer things.  These nearer things were many, for Valentine’s original asceticism, which had displayed itself essentially in the slight bareness of his principal sitting-room had apparently been swept away by a tumultuous greed for ornaments.  The room was crowded with furniture, chairs, and sofas of the most peculiar shapes, divans and tables, bookstands and settees.  One couch was made of wood, carved and painted into the semblance of a woman, between whose outstretched arms was placed the pillow to receive the head of one resting there.  Another lay on the bent backs of two grinning Indian boys, whose crouching limbs seemed twined into a knot.  Upon the tables and cabinets stood a thousand ornaments, many of them silver toys, sweetmeat-boxes, tiny ivory figures and wriggling atrocities from the East.  But what struck the doctor most in the transformation of the room was the panorama presented upon its walls.  The pictures that he remembered so well were all gone.  The classical figures, the landscapes full of atmosphere and of delicacy had vanished.  And from their places leered down jockeys and street-women painted by Jan